When Donald Trump addressed the National Rifle Association’s presidential forum late last week, the Republican focused on both the recent past and the near future. Both mattered, though for different reasons.
Let’s start with the former. The Daily Beast reported:
Former President Donald Trump boasted to a gathering of National Rifle Association members Friday in Pennsylvania that his administration “did nothing” about guns. After stoking fears that the current president wants to “confiscate your guns and annihilate your God-given right to self-defense,” Trump recapped how he handled calls for stricter gun legislation.
“During my four years, nothing happened,” the former president boasted. “And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”
Part of the problem with this, of course, is that there were a great many mass shootings during Trump’s term, and bragging about how little he did in response to the deadly violence isn’t the political winner the Republican seems to think it is. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine comments like these appearing in Democratic ads in the fall.
The other part of the problem is that he was brazenly lying. As I noted in my first book (see chapter 8), it was in February 2018, in the wake of a mass school shooting, when the then-Republican president held a televised, hourlong discussion with a group of lawmakers from both parties about gun violence. As part of the conversation, then-Vice President Mike Pence raised the prospect of empowering law enforcement to take weapons away from those who’ve been reported to be potentially dangerous, though he added that he expected to see “due process so no one’s rights are trampled.”
“Take the firearms first and then go to court,” Trump interjected. At the same event, the then-president endorsed a law enforcement model in which police officers confiscated some Americans’ guns “whether they had the right or not.”
When…
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