President Trump’s meeting at the White House on the question of guns centered on one-sided measures from the gun-control faction. It focused on improving background checks and enabling authorities to seize guns from disturbed persons, like, say, the deranged youngster who committed the Parkland massacre and who, all sides agree, should never have been in possession of deadly weapons.

Disarming those who shouldn’t be armed, though, is only one side of the reforms needed in our gun laws in America. The other is ending state and local restrictions that deny to sane, law abiding persons in America the right to keep and bear arms that is, supposedly, guaranteed by the Constitution. That, too, needs to be addressed. And would be addressed, at least in part, by legislation already moving through Congress.

That is the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. It would enable a person licensed to carry a handgun in any state to carry the weapon in any other state that permits anyone to carry a concealed weapon. It’s not a perfect measure; a better measure would require any state simply to honor a gun permit of any type issued by any state. Concealed carry reciprocity, though, has already passed the House. So it’s a good place to start.

Yet this got lost at the White House meeting yesterday. At one point, Senator Feinstein talked about how she acceded to the mayoralty of San Francisco after the assassination of Mayor Mascone and was trained to, and did, carry a weapon. Yet she would have been arrested were she to attempt to carry that weapon into New York City, where the Second Amendment has been nullified by state law.

This, in our oft-stated view, is why the national instant criminal background checks legislation that, say, Senators Manchin and Toomey seek to strengthen has been so difficult to pass. They say their legislation is about improving the NICS. Yet neither Mr. Manchin nor Mr. Toomey has made it his business to get concealed carry reciprocity moving in the Senate (it passed the House on a bipartisan vote in December).

“Mr. President,” Mr. Manchin said at one point yesterday, “there’s not a person in West Virginia who believes you’re not going to defend their Second Amendment rights.” Maybe Mr. Manchin will offer a bill to change the West Virginia nickname to “the credulous state.” The only person to raise concealed carry reciprocity was Congressman Steve Scalise, who less than a year ago was shot and almost killed at Virginia.

Yet when Mr. Scalise did raise the concealed carry reciprocity, which he did halfway through the meeting after the anti-gun Democrats had their say, he was quickly brushed aside by the President. “I think that maybe that bill will one day pass, but it should pass separate,” Mr. Trump said. “If you’re going to put concealed carry between states into this bill, we’re talking about a whole new ball game.”

We’d have thought a whole new ball game was the reason Mr. Trump was elected in the first place. “I’m with you,” Mr. Trump claimed, “but let it be a separate bill.” It’s an odd echo of another presidential formulation heard Wednesday, the business about seizing the guns first and only then following up with due process. We are for enforcing every article of the Bill of Rights with equal and constant attention.

In addressing the gun question, President Trump has a well-earned advantage over his predecessors, widely acknowledged yesterday. His advantage is precisely that he allied himself with the National Rifle Association in the election. What will be left of that advantage, however, if he moves to tighten up on regulation of guns without also making sure that the Second Amendment is available to law-abiding Americans?