While President Trump said earlier this week that he was open to working across the aisle to make it more difficult for people to acquire assault weapons such as the one used in Parkland, Florida, during his speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) on Friday, Trump resorted to fear, accusing Democrats of wanting to eliminate the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
“Don’t be complacent. If they get in, 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.”
Minutes later, Trump repeated the line, telling the audience:
“They’ll take away your Second Amendment. Remember that.”
Later in the speech, the president criticized the notion of schools being gun-free zones and doubled down on comments he’s made this week about arming teachers:
“If this guy [Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz] thought that other people would be shooting bullets back at him, he wouldn’t have gone to that school. He wouldn’t have gone there. It’s a gun-free zone. It says this the gun-free zone.
“When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones it just puts our students in far more danger.”
What Trump neglected to mention is that most mass shooters don’t even taken into consideration that an area may be a gun-free zone. The Las Vegas shooter killed 58 people in 2017 by firing semiautomatic weapons from the window of a hotel room. The hotel was not a gun-free zone.
Also ignored by the president, the NRA, and conservative Republicans who carry water for the gun lobby is this simple fact: Australia and Canada have toughened gun ownership rights and seen the number of gun deaths in their countries fall dramatically. In Australia, exactly zero mass shootings have occurred since gun control was passed in 1996.
Canada has seen a similar decrease in deaths by gun. In 2012, the U.S. saw a total of 8,813 murders involving the use of firearms that year. In that same year, Canada recorded just 172 firearms-related homicides.
While Trump tries to lie his way out of doing anything to help curb the problem of mass shootings in the United States, children are dying. Unless he takes concrete measures to change that, it’s just another of his broken promises.
Featured Image Via YouTube Screengrab
