Trump Says Second Amendment Is "Gone" If Dems Win In November

In a string of tweets on Sunday, Donald Trump once again reminded voters of the importance of the Second Amendment in this year’s elections, though he delve into too many details about why the the right to keep and bear arms would be threatened with extinction if Joe Biden wins the White House in November.

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Now, I think Trump is right when he says the Second Amendment is at stake in the election, but I’d love to see the president get more specific about why that’s the case. The typical media response when Trump says stuff like this is to huff and proclaim that “Joe Biden says he supports the Second Amendment,” and it’s up to the Trump campaign to hammer home why Biden’s proclamations are meaningless.

Biden himself describes the Second Amendment as “limited” on his campaign website, but never gets around to saying exactly what he believes those limitations are. Trump needs to remind voters that Biden and Kamala Harris want to ban the most popular rifles and commonly-owned ammunition magazines in the country. That alone would turn the Second Amendment from a right into a privilege, and would turn tens of millions of legal gun owners into criminals if they didn’t hand over their arms to the government in a compensated confiscation scheme or fork over hundreds of dollars in taxes for every gun and magazine they register with the federal government.

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That’s Biden’s stated plan, but Trump should also remind voters that once those arms are registered, Democrats are likely to come back for more. After all, they routinely describe AR-15’s and 15-round magazines as “battlefield weapons of war” that need to be “taken off of our streets.” As bad as it is, I don’t think Biden’s plan goes far enough for many of his allies in Congress, and there’s no guarantee that the Biden/Harris plan would actually be the gun ban bill that gets to the Oval Office.

The threat to the Second Amendment posed by a Biden/Harris administration runs even deeper than their proposed gun ban. The future of the Supreme Court is also at stake, and Biden allies like Chuck Schumer are already promising to pack the Court with anti-gun justices if Trump appoints a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Over the weekend Politico laid out how Schumer and Democrats in the Senate could ensure that an anti-gun majority is on the bench within weeks of Biden being sworn into office.

Within days, or moments, of the start of a new Senate session, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announces his intention to move legislation that would expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 members, to “repair the wound inflicted on our Constitution by the Republicans’ refusal to recognize the will of the electorate.” The Senate and House pass the bill, and President Joe Biden signs it on Inauguration Day.

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Politico notes that Biden himself as objected to the idea of packing the court as recently as last year, but concludes that those past statements may very well come with an expiration date if Democrats take control of the White House and the Senate in November.

There’s a good reason that more than 80 years ago, in a time of turmoil, a Democratic president at the peak of his political power nonetheless found his plans thwarted by members of his own party, who found the cost of tinkering with constitutional machinery too high a price to pay. If McConnell calls a lame-duck session in the face of an electoral loss to lock in a conservative court majority, however, it’s hard to imagine any such concerns staying the hands of Democrats.

It’s up to the Trump campaign to spell out to voters exactly what is at stake and why. An anti-gun Supreme Court wouldn’t just deny any new challenges to gun control laws. Justices could also reverse the Heller and McDonald decisions, or undo as much of those victories as possible in future court challenges, rendering the Second Amendment a dead letter, at least legally speaking.

Boilerplate language about saving the Second Amendment may be enough for the base, but there are millions of new gun owners right now who aren’t necessarily stalwart members of the GOP or even all that knowledgable about the intricacies of the fight over the future of the Second Amendment. They need to know the specifics of why a Biden victory would be disastrous for our right to keep and bear arms, and they’re not going to find out from either the media or the Biden campaign.

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