Mulvaney on Virginia Beach shooting: "Let's not get too deep into politics too soon"

Responding to calls for gun control after Friday's mass shooting in Virginia Beach, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney cautioned against getting into politics "too soon" after tragedy, and told NBC's Chuck Todd: "You're never going to make everything perfectly safe, but we are doing a lot better on enforcement."

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MULVANEY: "What's been lost in the last couple of years is the fact that this administration banned bump stocks. We signed a piece of legislation that fixed the background checks."

TODD: "What about the silencer situation? That seems like a legitimate concern."

MULVANEY: "I'm more familiar with the situation in Charleston several years ago, where a guy walks into a church and shot my desk mate in South Carolina Senate. That's where the background check system let us all down. And we fixed that last year with this administration on a bipartisan basis. So there are things the government can do, and there's things this government is doing, but we're never going to protect everybody against everybody who is deranged, insane. I don't know what the shooter's motivation was. ... You're never going to make everything perfectly safe, but we are doing a lot better on enforcement."

Why it matters: The U.S. has more mass shootings than any other country in the world. Federal resources are steered toward shootings motivated by “terrorist ideology,” but most are simply treated as “a local crime, a state crime," according to former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Napolitano told "Axios on HBO" that mass gun violence is one of the top threats to safety and security in the U.S.

The bottom line: Friday's shooting at Virginia Beach Municipal Center was the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since November 2018, when 12 people were killed at Borderline Bar & Grill in California.

Go deeper:

• What we know so far: 12 dead in Virginia Beach shooting
• The deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history
• Gun violence as a national security threat