LOUISVILLE,
Ky. — As he seeks to unite a fractured party, Donald Trump rallied
one of the Republican Party’s most faithful constituencies on Friday, telling
an audience of thousands of gun owners at the National Rifle Association’s
annual convention that he will be a faithful defender of the right to bear arms
if he wins the presidency.
“I won’t let you down,” the presumptive Republican nominee
vowed.
The promise won Trump the NRA’s endorsement, and the
group’s leaders repeatedly urged conservatives to unite behind the real estate
mogul as they prepare to take on a mutual foe: likely Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton.
In what was his second appearance before the NRA
membership, Trump slammed Clinton as the most “anti-gun” and “most anti-Second
Amendment” candidate ever to seek the presidency.
“The Second Amendment is on the ballot this November,”
Trump said. “The only way to save the Second Amendment is to vote for
… Donald Trump.”
He repeatedly assailed Clinton — for whom he’s coined
a new nickname, “Heartless Hillary” — suggesting she may pack the Supreme
Court with judges who would undermine gun rights. He accused Clinton of
wanting Americans to be “defenseless” in the face of terrorism, such as the
attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
As he has previously stated on the campaign trail, Trump
suggested that the San Bernardino, Calif., attack last December might have been
avoided if there had been more armed citizens on site. “I would have: Boom!,”
Trump said, mimicking the firing of a gun — a move that prompted wild applause
from the Louisville audience.
Trump’s speech came as his campaign has sought to reassure
conservatives wary about his shifting views on a variety of policy issues over
the years. Though Trump has made gun rights a central plank of his White
House bid, he was decidedly more moderate on the issue before he was a
candidate.
“I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on
assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a
gun,” Trump wrote in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve.”
In the book, which was released when Trump was considering
a run for the presidency as a Reform Party candidate, he was critical of
the GOP’s hard-line stance on guns. While he noted he “generally oppose[s]
gun control,” Trump in the book argued for a middle ground between banning
guns outright and additional regulation.
“The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited
restrictions,” Trump wrote at the time.
But in the year since he officially launched his White
House bid, Trump reversed positions, coming out in opposition to expanded
background checks and calling gun bans “a total failure.”
He has called for removing gun-free zones from schools and military
bases, insisting he would repeal those rules on his first day in office.
He repeated the pledge on Friday, a statement that
prompted a standing ovation from the crowd. And he upped the ante even further,
vowing to repeal dozens of President Obama’s executive orders “within the
first hour” of his presidency if he is elected.
While Trump won the NRA’s endorsement and kicked off their
annual day of political speakers, the tone of the proceedings was less a
celebration of Trump’s candidacy than a call for NRA members to do
everything to defeat Clinton this fall.
Preceding Trump onstage, Chris Cox, head of the NRA’s
political arm, warned the gun owners about complacency in the general election.
He suggested that Clinton could exploit discord in the GOP to chart her
path to victory.
“If we don’t show up at the polls this November, we will
witness the end of individual freedom in this country,” Cox said. “We’ve got to
get together. It’s time to unite. If your preferred candidate dropped out
of the race, it’s time to get over it.”
Clinton, Cox added, “has a legitimate chance to be the
next presidents as long as people like us stay home.”
Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, put
the stakes of the election in starker terms. “If [Clinton] gets just one
Supreme Court nomination … you can kiss your guns goodbye,” he said.
