Stephen Willeford faced down evil when he used his AR-15 rifle to help stop the attack at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX in 2017. Now he’s using his voice and his vote to defend the Second Amendment against the threat posed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Willeford is my guest on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, and he was fired up from the moment we began our conversation with a question about Joe Biden’s proposed gun and magazine ban. As Willeford rightly pointed out, Biden would require him to hand the AR-15 and magazines that he used to to stop a mass murderer over to the federal government, or else pay $200 per gun and magazine to Uncle Sam with a politician’s promise that Willeford will get to keep his guns just as long as he registers them with the government.

Every four years we hear that “this is the most important election,” acknowledged Willeford, but that’s because it’s generally true. Maybe at some point in the future our two political parties will be more closely aligned and elections matter less, but that’s certainly not the case when it comes to the Second Amendment this election year. There’s a clear contrast between the platforms of Donald Trump and Joe Biden when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. Trump’s vowing to protect it, while Biden’s promising to limit it.

Willeford told me that back in 2016, he cast his vote as more of a protest against Hillary Clinton than a vote in favor of Donald Trump. He was skeptical of Trump’s campaign promises, but Willeford says he believes that Trump has delivered; from increased border security to appointing judges and (three!) Supreme Court justices who acknowledge that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right and shouldn’t be treated as such by lawmakers.

Donald Trump has earned Stephen Willeford’s vote in 2020, and he says it’s critically important for gun owners to join him. Willeford just returned from stumping for Trump in Pennsylvania, and he says a Republican campaign operative in the state told him that in 2016, some 600,000 gun owners in Pennsylvania didn’t vote. Trump won the state by less than 45,000 votes out of more than 6,000,000 cast.

Now, not every one of those gun owners would have voted for Trump, but if Trump had gotten 60% of those votes, he would have added another 140,000 votes to his lead in the state. And if those 600,000 voters were to go to the polls next Tuesday, they could easily provide the margin of victory for Trump in Pennsylvania this year.

As we began to wrap up the conversation, Willeford brought up Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech from 1964, in which Reagan said:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

As Willeford told me, he doesn’t want to be the generation that loses freedom for his children and his children’s children. It’s why he’s traveling around the country instead of hunkering down at home with his family, why he’s speaking out about the stark choices and deep divides of this election, and why he’s casting his vote for Donald Trump.