Pro Gun Supporters Say Trump May Lose Their Votes Over Recent Comments

Certain gun rights supporters and advocates are contemplating staying home instead of voting for Trump in 2020, after President Trump’s comments this week suggesting he will support some new gun restrictions.  Trump’s comments came in the wake of last weekend’s mass shootings.

Trump told reporters that he would “certainly” bring up a semiautomatic gun ban, and pushed lawmakers to expand mandatory background checks and to allow temporary gun confiscation.

“I’ll be convincing some people to do things that they don’t want to do, and that means people in Congress,” Trump said, calling for “great legislation after all of these years.”

These comments came less than a week after Trump warned 17,000 supporters at an Ohio campaign rally that if the Democrats win in 2020 “there is no Second Amendment.”

Trump’s call for increased gun control measures angered gun rights activists who want to see Trump as a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.

“I am no longer committed to voting for Donald Trump,” said [Michael Hammond, legislative counsel of Gun Owners of America, which claims 2 million members and supporters], who spends most of his time in New Hampshire.  “I think he’s about to make his ‘read my lips’ mistake.  He thinks he can do anything on the Second Amendment and gun owners will love him.”

Hammond also said Trump risks losing voters across the Midwest.

“You don’t have to lose every member of the NRA to be a one-term president.  You have to lose about as many as he is on the verge of losing,” Hammond said.  “The bitter clingers are sitting there in the western tier of Pennsylvania, Macomb County, Michigan and in north Wisconsin.”

Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, agrees with Hammond’s sentiment:

“There’s going to be a lot of people who see these types of anti-Second Amendment policies as a reason to stay home,” Combs said.  “With President Trump, what we’re going to get is a New York liberal who calls himself a Republican.”

“We never trusted him,” Combs added.  “We certainly don’t trust people who don’t have an understanding of how the Constitution works.  [Trump] has gone out of his way on guns and firearms policy to show how little he understand how the Constitution works, how our culture works.”

This is slightly worrisome, because Trump needs these voters to turn out in order to win. It’s also extremely dumb on the part of people like Hammond and Combs.  For one thing, Trump says a lot of things, but the things he says don’t always align with the policies he ultimately puts in place.  I think it would be prudent for these guys to wait and see what happens before they start to cool on Trump based on comments  he made in the aftermath of mass tragedy.  Also, they might not like Trump’s recent comments on gun control, but they have to know he’ll be MUCH friendlier to gun owners than anyone on the other side of the aisle.

Trump is right when he says “there is no Second Amendment” if the Democrats take power in 2020.  As much as I hate the idea of “vote for the lesser of two evils” that’s undeniably what Trump is for anyone who values freedom, individual rights, and the American way.  Love Trump or hate him, he’s shown a lot of respect for the American values that the left wants to replace with socialism and governmental control.  Sitting out the 2020 election because you disagree with some of Trump’s rhetoric is the political equivalent of cutting of the nose to spite the face.  It’s a bad idea, and it could pave the way for someone much worse to take his place.