This feature appears in the June ‘17 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
As long as I have been observing and participating in American politics I have never seen anything like the vitriol, the searing hatred of much of the media, and the leadership of the Democrats in Congress toward a sitting president of the United States. Toxic is not a strong enough word to describe the one-sided poisonous atmosphere in Washington, D.C.
Those who so deeply despise President Donald Trump also despise the good and decent Americans who voted him into the highest office. Those who despise President Trump especially loathe the NRA for helping make Trump’s victory over arch-gun-banner Hillary Clinton possible.
All of the media anger and leftist anger toward the NRA means we are doing our job.
Fighting for freedom means we fight to protect those who believe as we do. NRA members know we made the difference in electing a president who is an American patriot of such great promise.
Promise is a remarkably accurate word to describe our president
Unlike some in the world of politics, Trump truly is a man of his word. He keeps his promises.
He pledged that he would be tough on violent crime.
With Trump’s pick of U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general, the nation has a chief law enforcement officer who will vigorously enforce laws intended to take armed criminals off the street.
Trump pledged that he would reverse the flood of unconstitutional executive orders imposed under former President Barack Obama as he made the absurd boast that he would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
In that, we have Trump’s back.
Working with Congress, the president signed into law legislation rescinding the Obama administration’s insane rule that was designed to deprive tens of thousands of Social Security recipients of their Second Amendment-protected rights simply because their financial affairs were being handled by a friend or relative acting as a “representative payee.” Those older Americans were to be automatically thrown into the same “prohibited persons” category as convicted felons and thus be disarmed.
Over the next year, we can expect to see a host of illegal, unconstitutional Obama rulings removed.
President Trump will clean out the swamp in Washington.
But to do all this, he needs us to watch his back. He needs the same deep commitment from NRA members and fellow gun owners that we devoted to the election.
And that gets me to the most important promise that Trump has kept. It is summed up in a few words: The composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.
With securing the U.S. Senate confirmation of federal U.S. Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump has elevated a qualified and deserving successor to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, easily the most important jurist in our lifetime. For those of your friends who don’t remember, it was Justice Scalia who penned the landmark Heller decision—shutting down the District of Columbia’s ban on armed self-defense in the home and declaring the Second Amendment an individual right.
When the NRA promised President Trump that we had his back, we meant it. He keeps his word. We keep ours.
With a very sophisticated media and lobbying effort, the NRA went all out to support Gorsuch’s confirmation. Once again NRA members proved the grassroots power of the NRA as the oldest civil rights organization in the country.
In Associate Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, we have a highly distinguished justice who is in the Scalia mold of an originalist who will honor the intent of the founders.
The fact that arch-anti-gun U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., led a failed Senate fight to kill the Gorsuch nomination defines the importance of his addition to the court.
Over and over in his relentless attacks on Gorsuch, Schumer claimed the only thing that counts is ideology and that the president’s pick was out of the “mainstream.”
If you want to get an idea of how Schumer defines “mainstream,” look no further than the words of his allies in the gun-ban crowd.
The Brady Campaign especially went nuts in its reaction to Gorsuch and the fact that NRA was doing all we could to support the president’s nominee:
“The verdict is in: The going rate to buy a Supreme Court seat is now in the millions. This week the corporate gun industry, led by the NRA, looks to Capitol Hill to cash in on millions of dollars it’s spent convincing vulnerable senators to confirm Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. And for gun industry lapdogs in the Senate, the price is just right.”
After the confirmation vote, their nasty hype was even worse: “We’ll hold Gorsuch and the senators who sold out his seat accountable for any decision he makes that puts gun industry profits ahead of the right of all Americans not to be shot.”
Then there was this comment from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s Josh Horwitz: “If Gorsuch shares the NRA’s toxic ideology, he is already at odds with the overwhelming majority of Americans.”
Echoing Schumer’s theme, Americans for Responsible Solutions whined, “Judge Gorsuch’s views are so outside the mainstream. … His irresponsible record indicates he would actually weaken the gun laws on the books.”
Finally, try this statement from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence: “Gorsuch is such a radical choice that his presence on the court threatens to undermine half a century’s worth of firearms policy and to gravely jeopardize public safety.”
It was an extraordinarily proud day when we endorsed then-candidate Trump in his run for the presidency. To the 5 million NRA members, I tell you that you made the difference. You saved the nation. You saved the Second Amendment!
Trump’s election was indeed about saving the greatness of America—our traditions, our rule of law and the preservation of our liberty.
In that we will always have his back.
