MILWAUKEE — Republicans at their party convention said their commitment to gun rights and expanding concealed carry wasn’t diminished by the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
The party, according to delegates and lawmakers at the Republican National Convention, remained steadfastly opposed to sweeping gun control laws such as a ban on so-called assault weapons such as the AR-15-style rifle used by Mr. Trump’s would-be assassin.
Addressing a gathering of Second Amendment activists at the convention, Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas said the attack Saturday on Mr. Trump only proves that firearms in the hands of law-abiding individuals are necessary.
“There are 400 million guns currently in circulation. Guns aren’t going anywhere,” Mr. Hunt said. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, and that guy is now dead because a good guy with a gun shot him.”
He added, “Imagine how many moral lives were spared because that sniper acted and took him out immediately.”
Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita briefly appeared at the event and said the campaign supports “allowing law-abiding citizens the ability to carry their firearms and to protect themselves and to protect their families.”
The shooter grazed Mr. Trump’s ear, killed a man and critically wounded two others at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The GOP platform, which was drawn up before the assassination attempt, did not include robust language about defending Second Amendment rights — an omission that irked the party’s gun rights activists.
The Reload, a publication focused on firearms policy and politics, slammed the Republican Party for retreating from its 2016 platform that included three paragraphs about gun rights and denounced Democratic legislation that would “eviscerate the Second Amendment.”
This year, gun rights are mentioned in passing in the platform in a list of “twenty promises that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican Majorities in the House and Senate.” The seventh promise says Republicans will “defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.”
The GOP didn’t have a platform document in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic prompted the party to hold a virtual national convention.
Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida assured gun-rights activists at the gathering, which was sponsored by U.S. Concealed Carry, that the platform’s drive-by treatment of the Second Amendment did not mean Republicans were less concerned about the issue.
“Everyone has always and will forever associate the conservative movement as right in line with the principle of 2A — ’shall not be infringed,’” she said. “Just because we don’t explicitly talk about it in a political platform for a single cycle doesn’t mean that we are not absolutely adherent to the belief that Americans have the right to defend themselves.”
Ms. Cammack said Republicans in Congress are working on passing national reciprocity legislation that would enable legal gun owners to carry concealed firearms across state lines, similar to how a driver’s license works.
Currently, states only have reciprocity agreements with blocks of other states to recognize their concealed carry permits.
Ms. Cammack said that to realize goals such as nationwide concealed-carry reciprocity, they must register more gun owners to vote and send more Republicans to Washington.
“There are over 10 million hunters and gun owners in this country that are not registered to vote, so that is a missed opportunity for us as [Second Amendment] advocates to make sure that we are actually doing the work to secure that victory,” she said. “We cannot turn the corner into January and start talking about how we’re going to do national reciprocity if we don’t have the votes.”
The Supreme Court made several landmark decisions on firearms in the past 16 years. The rulings ranged from the right of private citizens to possess a common type of weapon and use it for lawful purposes to striking down state laws that required anyone who wanted to carry a concealed handgun outside the home to show “proper cause” for the license.
Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin told the gathering that the loss of gun rights will not necessarily come in sweeping court rulings, but rather through small pieces of gun control legislation pushed by Democrats.
“They’re going to nibble around the edges. And that’s what we saw on a regular basis. And I think we’re seeing that in D.C. as well right now,” he said. “When you see some of the bills that have made their way through under the guise of safety … that’s where you have to be alarmed,” he said.
“We have to be diligent as legislators to protect the Second Amendment. … You can’t continue to pass bill after bill with some cute type of name that would lead people to believe that it’s about security,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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