The pandemic has been making life quite difficult for many of us, but if we don’t figure out a way to deal with Trump’s invitations to violence things can get a lot worse.
Gun owners are not made in cookie cutters and the differences are large. I know lots of people who own guns and it’s never given me a moment’s concern. Many if not most gun owners are responsible and trustworthy. They are not killers and they’re not using their guns to play rough with people.
But there is a minority that believe that gun rights, or what Mr. Trump prefers to call Second Amendment rights, give them the privilege to threaten, intimidate and even kill to make things come out their way. Threats, intimidation and murder are not protected by the Second Amendment. They’re crimes. People who believe the Second Amendment gives them such rights are hooligans or terrorists, not responsible people who deserve anything but the insides of jail cells or loony bins. Those people are “deplorable.”
The statisticsmake clear that they’ve done more damage in America than the foreign terrorists we say we fear. Trump wants us to believe that there are, as he put it, good people on both sides, but White Supremacists account for the vast majority of home-grown terrorism in this country. And they reliably respond to his invitations, resulting in a very clear and present danger of violence and bloodshed.
When Mr. Trump told people to liberate Michigan with their Second Amendment rights, he was not suggesting that they keep their guns holstered or cased or even pointed at the sky. He was appealing to hooligans and terrorists to force the rest of us to do their bidding.
When Mr. Trump took office the Constitution required him to:
" solemnly swear (or affirm) that [he] will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Millions of Americans have taken oaths that we were
“not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence.”
In fact Mr. Trump is trying to overthrow it. A leading, so-called birther, he denied Obama’s right to the office though Obama was properly elected and behaved in a careful and thoughtful way for the good of all of us. By contrast, Trump uses the classic methods to try to overthrow the government by force and violence. Budding dictators encourage violence, create chaos and then pose as the savior to take over. When Trump creates a clear and present danger of violence by inviting gun owners to use their Second Amendment rights, they get the signal, and Trump relies on their lawlessness to put people in terror if they oppose him. Like other budding dictators who’ve called out the military against their own people, Trump called out a show of military force against domestic demonstrators to clear his path to a photo op in front of a Washington church and over-awe Americans with his control of the levers of deadly power. A would-be dictator, Mr. Trump is repudiating his American citizenship.
Guns owners who respond to Trump’s incitement are giving a very bad name to responsible gun owners, to owners who don’t use their voices and their votes to constrain political behavior like that. It’s time totake back the NRA from the unreconstructed Civil War rebels, terrorists, hooligans and their enablers who claim the protection of their guns and the Second Amendment in your name. It’s time to break the White House link with liars, hooligans, and terrorists.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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