In the immediate aftermath of the massacres in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, Donald Trump actually began to contemplate doing a tiny sliver of the right thing. In doing so, he ran straight into the teeth of the Second Amendment, without doubt the most lethally misunderstood corner of the U.S. Constitution.

On the Sunday after the attacks, Trump reached out to Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, whose co-sponsored 2013 bill to augment background checks after Sandy Hook was defeated by Republicans in the Senate despite overwhelming public support for the measure. Trump wanted to know if it could be revived, if there was enough congressional support to see it through this time.

As Trump is still Trump, he started planning a Rose Garden signing ceremony before anyone had taken the cap off a drafting pen. Still, it was a move in a positive direction. The Manchin-Toomey bill, while not nearly perfect or sufficient to meet the amalgamated crises we call “gun violence,” would close the yawning loophole that allows weapon sales at gun shows and over the internet to take place without background checks.