In a rousing speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, President Donald Trump warned an enthusiastic audience that if Democrats regain control of Congress and the White House, tax cuts and the right to keep and bear arms are in serious jeopardy.
“If they get in,” Trump predicted, “they will repeal your tax cuts, they will put judges in that you wouldn’t believe, they’ll take away your Second Amendment, which we will never allow to happen.”
At the mention of the amendment, the crowd roared. A few moments later, when the president asked the audience to choose between keeping tax cuts or the Second Amendment, gun rights was the hands down winner considering the loud reaction.
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Gun rights are in the political and media crosshairs in the aftermath of the Florida massacre that left 17 students and adults dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On Thursday, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, asserted that the Democratic Party during Barack Obama’s administration fell under the control of radical socialists who hate the Second Amendment.
On Friday, just before Trump took the stage, Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, blasted gun control proponents for attacking the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
“For years,” Gottlieb said in a statement to the press, “we have endured the efforts of anti-gun elitists and their political lap dogs to erode our rights and hold honest gun owners responsible for crimes they didn’t commit. We have been slandered, marginalized and demonized.
“The feel-good fakery of gun control and gun-free zones has been exposed in the aftermath of the Parkland tragedy,” he added. “Enough is enough.”
The president wants to end gun-free zones, and allow qualified teachers with firearms experience to carry guns in schools. He was openly critical of a Broward County sheriff’s deputy who, it was revealed Thursday, waited outside the school building where the carnage was happening. That deputy was suspended without pay and subsequently retired.
That revelation, in the wake of other disclosures about law enforcement’s failure to act on tips about the accused killer, opened a proverbial can of worms.
“We must give teachers and administrators a fighting chance,” Gottlieb noted in his statement, “especially if armed authorities hesitate. Instead of treating gun owners as second class citizens we should allow them the option of being first responders.”
Gottlieb was attending CPAC this week when the facts about those critical minutes of mayhem emerged.
Incredibly, Reuters reported that a Chinese newspaper has editorialized about gun rights in the United States. The newspaper argued that gun ownership should be restricted.
Coincidentally, Raw Story published an essay alleging that the Second Amendment had been adopted to protect slavery. Incredibly, responding readers seemed to overwhelmingly accept that notion while supporting repeal of the Second Amendment.
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