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The top lobbyist for the National Rifle Association claimed late Thursday that President Trump had retreated from his surprising support a day earlier for gun control measures after a meeting with N.R.A. officials and Vice President Mike Pence in the Oval Office. The lobbyist, Chris Cox, posted on Twitter just after 9 p.m. that he met with Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence, saying that “we all want safe schools, mental health reform and to keep guns away from dangerous people. POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA #MAGA.” (Shear, Gay Stolberg and Kaplan, 3/1)

Minutes into Donald Trump’s renegade embrace of the left’s wish list for gun control, Republican Rep. Warren Davidson’s phone lines blew up. “What is Trump doing?” texted one angry constituent from his conservative southwest Ohio district, according to Davidson. “You’ve got to stop this,” demanded another. “That can’t be real,” Davidson recalled thinking as his supporters — all Trump enthusiasts — unloaded on the president. (Everett and Bade, 3/1)

A Democratic senator is calling on appropriators to include funding in the upcoming budget bill for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study gun violence. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said he wants to provide $10 million a year for six years to conduct or support CDC research on firearms safety and gun violence prevention. (Weixel, 3/1)

An analysis published Friday confirms the state of American gun policy science is not good, overall. The nonprofit RAND Corporation analyzed thousands of studies and found only 63 that establish a causal relationship between specific gun policies and outcomes such as reductions in homicide and suicide, leaving lawmakers without clear facts about one of the most divisive issues in American politics. (Hersher, 3/2)

One of the lawmakers involved in writing the bill in 1996 was Jay Dickey, a Republican congressman from Arkansas who had the endorsement of the National Rifle Association. He says a lobbyist alerted him to the CDC’s gun-injury research. (Mack, 2/28)