Former President Donald Trump is running again. He's got a lock on the GOP nomination and polling shows him with a real shot to unseat President Joe Biden who hasn't exactly covered himself with glory during his four years in office.
One thing at least Biden's supporters have loved has been the anti-gun executive orders he's signed. They've done a number on gun rights in this nation, even if it hasn't been as much of a number as Biden might have liked.
With Biden's hold on the White House tenuous, gun control advocates have fears, especially as Trump is set to take the stage at the NRA Annual Meeting, in Dallas.
They worry Trump will do precisely what he's promised to do.
Emma Brown, executive director of the gun safety group Giffords, said: “The gun lobby, candidly, loves Donald Trump because they know that they can control him …[The NRA] really reflects a gun industry that has profited from mass violence in this country, and that is the industry that Trump is aligned with.”
Trump’s first term provided a preview of his approach to gun violence. The NRA spent $31m helping Trump win the 2016 election, making it the largest outside contributor to his campaign, and the group’s leaders had a direct line to the White House once he assumed office. After a pair of mass shootings in Texas and Ohio in 2019, Trump promised his administration would pursue “very meaningful background checks,” but he quickly walked back that pledge after a phone call with then NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre.
“When it comes to keeping Americans safe from gun violence, the choice is incredibly clear,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice-president of law and policy of the gun safety group Everytown, which was created after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012. “And I think voters across the country – and in blue and purple and red places – when they find out that Donald Trump is committed to doing nothing, they’re going to make a choice to vote for President Biden.”
Except the polling suggests that at least some of those purple states are looking more favorably at Trump, especially as the homicide rate has remained high following 2020's spike, albeit dropping year over year since then.
There's not much chance of red states suddenly deciding Biden represents their best interests, especially as those states have expanded gun rights and seen the lawmakers who did so re-elected.
There's a certain degree of delusion surrounding how some states are going to view Biden's gun control record, to say the least.
And because of that polling, there's a chance we'll find out of Trump will, in fact, follow through on what The Guardian called a threat but is really more of a promise. Well, if he does, it's only fair, right?
In Biden's first days in office, he overturned pretty much every executive order Trump signed. That included some that weren't really controversial such as one lowering the cost of insulin for diabetics.
If Trump takes office again, it only makes sense that he'd do something similar, especially concerning the executive overreach regarding the right to keep and bear arms. Make all of those go away and you end the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, thus ending the federal jobs program for anti-rights activists, and the rest of the nonsense we've seen over the last few years.
The truth is that anti-gunners are scared. They know that Biden doesn't have a firm hold on his office and they know him opening his mouth is hardly the strongest thing he can do, yet he has to campaign going forward, which means lots of opportunity to put his foot in his face hole.
They're terrified that one key gaffe might undo everything they've worked for since 2020.
They should be.
