Senator Ted Cruz blasted businessman and reality television star Donald Trump Sunday, stating that if Trump is the Republican nominee, we’ll likely lose our Second Amendment rights.

Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz on Sunday said primary rival Donald Trump will erase the Second Amendment if he is elected.

“And if Donald Trump becomes president, the Second Amendment will be written out of the Constitution, because it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump is not a conservative,” Cruz said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Trump has regularly insisted on the campaign trail that he is in favor of the right to keep and bear arms.

Cruz also said Trump would not “invest the [political] capital to confirm a conservative” nominee on the court.

I have bad news for supporters of Mr. Trump; every bit of evidence that we have about Donald Trump’s political core suggests that Senator Cruz is probably correct.

Trump’s personal history shows that he is, at best, a “Republican in Name Only,” (RINO), who has changed his party affiliation at least five times.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump switched political party affiliations at least five times since the late ‘80s, according to voting records obtained by The Smoking Gun.

Mr. Trump, who after years of teasing the idea announced on Tuesday his GOP bid for the White House, may soon have to answer for why he left the party as recently as 2011.

Mr. Trump registered for the first time in New York as a Republican in July 1987, only to dump the GOP more than a decade later for the Independence Party in October 1999, according to the New York City Board of Elections.

Trump changes party affiliations from Democrat to Republican to Independent with seeming reckless abandon. It appears that his party loyalty isn’t based upon any set of bedrock principles, but is instead the result of a sort of every-changing political calculus based upon the simple theory, “What will benefit me the most in the short term?”

Mr. Trump’s lack of conservative principles, and his heavily-documented history of using the bludgeon of the law against individual citizens when it benefits his bottom line—a Clintonesque authoritarianism—suggests that Trump simply cannot be trusted to put a textualist judge on the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in Texas of natural causes this past weekend.

Trump’s lack of any firm principles suggests that he’d instead nominate someone like himself, an opportunist, with no firm principles. As supporters of the entire Constitution, we simply cannot risk a candidate with so little real regard for constitutional principles, including our Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The Future Court

The next President of the United States will shape the future of American jurisprudence for decades to come. In addition to replacing Justice Scalia, it is quite possible (arguably probable) that the next President will end up replacing liberal justices Stephen Breyer (who is 77), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (82), and moderate Anthony Kennedy (79).

A conservative President with a Republican Senate could conceivably reshape the Supreme Court with up to four more texualists, joining textualist Clarence Thomas and libertarian-conservative Samuel Alito for a rock-solid six-vote cadre of justices that would read the Constitution as it was written, not as a “living document” that can be twisted and abused. In many decisions, we could expect moderate conservative Chief Justice John Roberts to side with the court’s textualists for 7-2 majorities.

This will no doubt include challenges to state and local gun bans, magazine bans, and perhaps even the constitutionality of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Justice Scalia’s death has brought the importance of the likely judicial nominees of candidates to the forefront for both parties.

We know that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would both nominate the most radically left-of-center candidates to the court that they can, and that they’d both like to gut the Second Amendment as much as possible. Sadly, of the remaining Republican contenders, front-runner Donald Trump is clearly the least conservative candidate based upon his own well-documented history of switching to the Democrat Party when doing so might help him personally profit.

In the end, we have to agree with Senator Cruz: allowing Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee would be a disaster for the long-term future of the Second Amendment and gun ownership in the United States.

From this moment forward, I strongly urge the 100+ million gun owners in the United States to only consider those Republican candidates with a well-documented history of supporting conservative principles, and who have records (not mere rhetoric) suggesting that they will only appoint textualists to the Supreme Court. It would be glorious to have Second Amendment cases flowing into a Supreme Court that firmly believed “shall not be infringed” means precisely what it says.

We’ll only get that court with a Republican nominee with a proven record of being willing to fight for conservative principles and conservative nominees, not a lukewarm pretender who changes parties and positions to whatever he thinks is easiest to sell.

Do your research, and vote wisely as the primaries come to your state.

South Carolina gun owners, all eyes are upon you.

Vote wisely.