Like it or not, President Donald Trump is going to push for some degree of gun control. Frankly, he has to do something to look like he’s working to stem the flow of mass shootings that seem to take up such a huge percentage of the media’s time in recent months. If he doesn’t, his chances of re-election are going to be slim. At least, that’s what the supposed experts are saying.

The question is, though, when?

It seems the president’s answer is “soon.”

President Donald Trump maintained Wednesday that he hopes to quickly see legislative action to address a spate of mass shootings, but he remained coy about what exactly he would support.

Fielding questions from reporters following a White House event on the opioid crisis, the president said that any gun reform proposal would need to be bipartisan.

Trump also expressed hope that Congress’ imminent return following a month-long recess would bring an agreement “soon.” And he explained that he is reviewing “many different concepts and many different things” in response to recent shootings, “including mental health which is, to me, a very important element of it.”

…

“I’ve been having a lot of phone discussions and some meetings with different people in the Senate and the House of Representatives and we’ll be making some pretty good determinations pretty soon,” he said. “We’re in touch with a lot of different people; there are many proposals put forward — I heard 29 different proposals, so there’s no lack of proposals, so we’ll have to see what happens.”

“People want to come to a solution if we can,” he added.

If you’re hoping for specifics, stop. There aren’t any. Even things that we’ve already heard about, such as the expedited death penalty, aren’t mentioned. The only thing is the mental health aspect, a drum Trump has been beating since Las Vegas, and for good reason. Sane people don’t start shooting up places.

However, even that is complicated.

Still, the worst part right now might be waiting. We don’t know what the proposals will be so we can’t delve into them to see if they make any sense or not. We can’t look at them yet to see if or how they abuse our Second Amendment rights. We don’t know anything.

I fear that by the time we do know, there won’t be much time for discussion before they are passed and signed by Trump. There won’t be much time for debate because too many people have a vested interest in keeping debate to a minimum. They want gun control passed so they can quell the unrest in their districts or states while keeping the news cycle as free from talking about what they’re doing as possible.

They can’t hide it, obviously, but they can damn sure try to downplay what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, don’t expect anyone to do any real work to combat mass shootings with anything other than gun control and vague notions of mental health. That’s about all anyone wants to hear anyway, and that’s a huge problem.

We’ll have to wait and see.