If you live in a “swing state,” your vote carries a special weight that votes in deep-blue or deep-red states don’t. The set of swing states changes every decade or so. It wasn’t a long time ago that Missouri was considered a bellwether state, and Iowa, New Mexico, and Florida’s pendulums swung back and forth. Even Illinois and California were once swing states. Nothing is constant except change. In this election cycle, the swing states are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Voters in states that decisively go for a candidate by 20+ percentage points, such as New York or California, can afford to wear white shoes, refuse to get into the muck, and vote their conscience. Being a New Yorker, I did this twice, happily voting for Gary Johnson (Libertarian) without any remorse whatsoever. Likewise, I have friends in deep-red states who have happily voted for Jill Stein (Green Party). However, if you live in a swing state, your impactful vote comes with a morally difficult choice.

Maybe it’s not a morally difficult choice for you; maybe it’s easy and obvious to choose one of the two major party candidates. However, I know several people who have serious, understandable reservations about Donald Trump. They don’t like Trump’s personal traits and prefer George W. Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s demeanor and temperament.

Personal traits matter, but political outcomes matter a whole lot more. A president will come and go, and his personal behaviors will become irrelevant the moment he leaves the White House, but his policy legacy will be etched permanently into history and will impact not just us, but our children, grandchildren, and generations beyond.

For those of you who live in a swing state and lean conservative, classical liberal, or libertarian, or are a left-leaning gun owner who’s worried about your gun rights foremost, I ask that you set aside those reservations and consider voting for Donald Trump. If you find the thought of voting for Trump unacceptable, consider it a tactical vote against Harris. 

There is a very solid case to vote against Kamala Harris and Fudd Walz. Their statements about support for the Second Amendment are false piety. When in power, they will absolutely unleash the power of the federal government against our right to keep and bear arms. They will deploy a ‘Whole-of-Government’ approach to attacking the Second Amendment.

What can a potential Harris-Walz administration do?

Judicial Appointments: I have observed the courts long enough and read enough case documents to know that a number of judges are a mix of ignorant or outright malevolent when it comes to guns. I’ve seen them game judicial processes too many times to attack our gun rights. As examples of their ignorance, read the illogical dissent (starting at Page 84) in NYSRPA v. Bruen, and then read Justice Alito’s systematic takedown of that dissent (starting at Page 70). For examples of how anti-Second Amendment judges game judicial processes, see how every pro-Second Amendment ruling in the Ninth Circuit gets gamed and/or en banc’d or struck down using creative thinking. Also read up on how a judge in Maryland withheld her dissenting opinion in a victory for gun rights for an entire year. Just yesterday, a judge in Colorado drew out a Colorado case filed by gun rights groups for two whole years, just to tell the plaintiffs they lacked standing.

The Potential for 8 Years of Judicial Appointments: A Harris-Walz administration will get to nominate judges for 4 entire years. Thanks to incumbency, Harris will be the favorite to win again in 2028. If that happens, you’re looking at the Courts getting filled with anti-Second Amendment judges until 2032. And there’s no guarantee that a Republican will win in 2032 either.

White House “Office of Gun Violence Prevention”: One of the worst things about a Democrat being in power is that they use your own tax dollars against you. Your money is taken out of your paycheck to pay the salaries of anti-rights apparatchiks who are colluding with gun control groups to attack your rights. Expect it to get much worse under a Harris-Walz administration.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Under the Biden-Harris administration, the CDC has resumed its surreptitious attacks on the Second Amendment. They quietly deleted a webpage that listed Defensive Gun Use (DGU) estimates, after colluding with gun control groups behind the scene. We would not have found out about this collusion if not for a gun control activist bragging about it on social media and a lawyer noticing it and filing a FOIA request for communications between gun control groups and the CDC. Of course, this blockbuster story was not covered by the mainstream media.

Department of Education: Last year, we saw how the Department of “Education” tried to eliminate federal funding to schools that had any sort of firearms instruction program or shooting sports activities. Expect the brainwashing of your kids using your own tax dollars to worsen under a Harris-Walz administration. In contrast, a Trump-Vance administration will attempt to eliminate federal meddling in education once and for all, or at a minimum, seriously downsize their apparatchik army. To the left-of-center gun owners reading this: education was just fine before the federal Department of Education was established in 1980. America put a man on the moon long before the federal DoE came into existence. Your state’s Department of Education should be able to carry the load as it did before 1980.

Censorship: The current administration pressured social media companies to censor whatever they didn’t like. They tried to establish a veritable clown as “Disinformation Czar,” an arbiter of truth. Fudd Walz thinks that “hate speech” (hate, of course, will be defined by him) is not protected by the First Amendment. Expect pressure on the private sector to shush any information that can be helpful to protect the Second Amendment. Case in point: the CDC suppression of DGU statistics above.

Nuking the legislative filibuster and Court Packing: Leading Democrats keep rattling their sabers about nuking the legislative filibuster and packing the Supreme Court. This is a really dangerous, short-sighted proposal that will have devastating consequences down the line. I’ve written about this before in detail if you’re interested.

There are a lot of other things that an anti-Second Amendment Presidency can do: unleash the Department of Commerce to interfere with the lawful commerce in firearms. Disrupt international commerce and supply chains that are necessary to keep the general militia in proper working order. Shovel more money into “research” to justify infringements on our rights. The list is endless. Thanks to their collusion with devious gun control authoritarians, they will be continuously supplied with new wicked ideas.

I totally understand that you may not like Trump. The left-leaning half of the country obviously doesn’t, but so do many traditional conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, and those in between. Voting for Trump given one’s dislike is a massive threshold to cross. However, given the structural dangers listed above, if you’re in a swing state, I hope you consider doing it anyway. You can justify it as a vote against Harris and a vote against the long-term, irreversible destruction of our basic rights.