The National Rifle Association is ready to have a defender of gun rights back in the White House, and they know that when it comes to a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton…well, it’s really no choice at all.
On Friday in Kentucky, NRA legislative director Chris Cox said, “Now is the time to unite. If your preferred candidate dropped out of the race, it’s time to get over it.”
In a statement released shortly after the endorsement, Cox expanded on the NRA’s support of the presumptive Republican nominee. “If Hillary Clinton gets the opportunity to replace Antonin Scalia with an anti-gun Supreme Court justice, we will lose the individual right to keep a gun in the home for self-defense,” Cox said. “Mrs. Clinton has said that the Supreme Court got it wrong on the Second Amendment. So the choice for gun owners in this election is clear. And that choice is Donald Trump.”
While Trump has been caught flat-footed a couple of times on issues important to conservatives, he has been consistent in his support for the Second Amendment. It’s not hard to see why. Trump may not know the ins and outs of the abortion debate, but he knows that America cannot exist without the rule of law. He knows that the rule of law depends not only on stopping street thugs and terrorists, but stopping government officials who might want to put the citizenry under state control. And he knows that without a strong, meaningful Second Amendment, the rest of our freedoms are nothing more than ink on parchment.
“The Second Amendment is under a threat like never before,” Trump said as we accepted the endorsement. “Crooked Hillary Clinton is the most anti-gun candidate ever to run for office. And, as I said before, she wants to abolish the Second Amendment. She wants to take your guns away. She wants to abolish it.”
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the NRA would have declined to endorse Trump, but his release of potential Supreme Court nominees probably made the decision a lot easier. His list of 11 was chock full of true conservative jurists who believe, as Scalia did, that we should err on the side of constitutional originalism. And anyone who adheres to that philosophy will take a dim view of any gun control law that inhibits the rights forged by divine fortune, intellectual brilliance, and bloodshed of our ancestors. If Trump picks justices like these, conservative America can learn to deal with his less attractive proposals.
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