President-Elect Donald Trump, the Once and Future President, ran in part as a pro-gun candidate. Considering who he ran against, that wasn't very hard to accept. I didn't like everything he did on guns during his first term, but he wasn't talking about banning handguns or mandatory buybacks for so-called assault weapons. That made him the hands-down winner in my book.

And the American public responded. Despite all the media hype about how gun control has such broad support, it didn't seem to benefit the anti-gun candidate one bit.

That marked good news for gun owners.

Trump now has to actually show he's true to his word on guns. Over at Firearms News, David Codrea has some thoughts on it.

“Trump promises to ‘rip up’ ATF rules,” Gun Owners of America announced in a YouTube video released shortly after the once and future president’s landslide electoral victory was confirmed. “We're going to hold President Trump to all his campaign promises.”

“Under a Trump Administration, all of those Biden disasters get ripped up and torn out my first week, but maybe my first day in office,” the president declared “Okay maybe my first.”

Expectations among gun owners are understandably high. They need to be tempered, though, because some things Donald Trump can do, others Constitutionally require an act of Congress, and all could be subject to legal challenges.

What follows is a long piece full of carefully nuanced thoughts that are both ambitiously pro-gun, yet terribly realistic in ways many gun rights supporters would prefer not to think about. After all, literally anything pro-gun Trump does will be subject to legal challenges.

After all, didn't we spend the last four years doing the same thing?

But Codrea doesn't dismiss the ideas out of hand. He just points out that there are some things to consider and discuss, including national reciprocity--should it be national permitless carry or should it be permits be like reciprocity is now, where permits are respected regardless of what state they originate in--among others.

Yet not everything is all puppies and daisies for him.

But Gaetz dropped out of consideration after a concerted attack by leftists and “moderate” Republicans raising scandalous accusations that had been dismissed by investigators, and Trump didn’t miss a beat in nominating Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to fill the slot.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again," Trump declared. "I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!"

Fox News readers agreed, with thousands of gushing comments of approval, oblivious to her selection being nothing less than an affront to gun rights advocates. NRA had called Bondi a “bully” in 2018 after she demanded a federal court deny anonymity to a 19-year-old woman who had requested it in a challenge to Florida’s new age restrictions on gun purchases.

NRA went on to sue Bondi over denial of rights for 18-20-year-olds, but the 11th Circuit, contrary to the Bruen standard of history, text, and tradition at the time of ratification, “decided that historical sources from Reconstruction are more probative of the Second Amendment’s scope than those from the Founding.”

Additionally, Bondi enthusiastically endorsed due process-denying “red flag” laws and was a prominent voice in opposition to overturning Florida’s ban on open carry, a position Senate President Ben Albritton and Establishment Republicans share with zealous Democrat gun prohibitionists. Her office asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit challenging Florida’s “bump stock” ban as an unconstitutional taking of property. And, per a deep dive into the case by The Last Refuge, she also “was part of that fraudulent prosecution architecture” in the George Zimmerman case. “In fact, without her origination the state case against [him] was non-existent.”

Bondi might be great on everything else, but she's clearly not a pro-Second Amendment type by any stretch of the imagination, and that's a big problem. Cam got into some of this shortly after the announcement.

Now, it's possible that Trump trusts Bondi not to be pro-gun so much as to do as she's directed, even if that runs counter to what she did in Florida. In fact, I hope that was the case because the attorney general oversees the entire Department of Justice, which includes the ATF. I don't want them answering to a gun grabber and while Bondi might not exactly be Shannon Watts when it comes to the Second Amendment, she's not Dana Loesch, either.

The way Codrea's piece is titled is that Trump owes gun rights supporters, and he does to some degree or another. We ignored any previous red flags and turned out to support him. If he wants a legacy of benefitting the GOP for generations to come, he can't afford to alienate anyone on this side of the gun debate.

All it would take is one decently gun-neutral Democrat to walk in and wreck any such legacy. It wouldn't even take a pro-gun one, just one not interested in taking anything, who just wants the status quo maintained. That would drive a lot of people to just stay at home if they can't trust Republicans to actually defend the Second Amendment.

That's not what we need right now.

Trump owes us and Bondi has tough questions to answer. Trump really should have picked his second option better, in my book.