Trump's base could threaten this organization's control over the GOP: analysis

MS NOW Columnist Philip Bump says the powerful Trump cult may accomplish something where countless others failed: reign in gun culture and the NRA.

It all began, he says, with a lie.

“As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump offered one particular promise repeatedly: He, not his Democratic opponents, would be a champion of gun rights,” said Bump. “So it was a bit jarring, then, when Trump suggested earlier this week that the death of Alex Pretti — shot to death in Minneapolis by Border Patrol agents — was somehow due to Pretti’s being armed.

“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns,” Trump said of Pretti’s legally-concealed weapon as he observed federal agents.“

If a Democrat had said it, woe unto them. But social media on Thursday was filled with Republican commenters saying Pretti essentially “had it coming,” and with mixed pushback from fellow MAGA conservatives.

Bump points out that firearm advocacy groups like long-term Trump allies the National Rifle Association, proffered a tepid response to his anti-gun statement, saying it believed “all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be.”

“Is it possible we have moved past a historic peak in American gun culture? Maybe — but the conditions that exist now may not last forever,” said Bump, reporting “the once-feared” NRA was “very successful in leveraging the Obama presidency to suggest that gun ownership was under threat.”

But since NRA former leader Wayne LaPierre was accused of siphoning off NRA money for his own benefit, the organization lost about a fifth of its membership between 2019 and 2022, said Bump.

A site that covers gun violence in America now noted a downturn in gun sales at the beginning of last year, but Bump said trends suggest one of the drivers of gun ownership in the months after the pandemic was urban residents, including Democrats who live in cities.

“The interpretation of the Second Amendment that has driven conservative politics for decades is that it is necessary in order to hold government oppression at bay. But now a putatively conservative president suggests that gun rights don’t extend to his political opponents,” said Bump.

Read the MS NOW report at this link.

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