Exclusive: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is taking a P.R. pounding for a sloppy Second Amendment reference interpreted as calling for Hillary Clinton’s assassination, but what was his intent, asks Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Donald Trump’s strange comment about “Second Amendment people” somehow stopping gun-control initiatives of a Hillary Clinton presidency has earned him condemnation for supposedly suggesting the assassination of his Democratic rival. And his inarticulate half sentence surely could be interpreted that way, which is alarming enough.
But I saw the phrase somewhat differently, that Trump – in his shock-jock style – was suggesting that Americans with AR-15s slung over their shoulders and with Glocks open-carried on their hips would respond to any new gun-control measures by mounting an armed insurrection against the hated “Guv-mint.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Such militant fantasies pervade the American Right (and some areas of the American Left), with the Second Amendment venerated not because it allows for hunting or even “home defense” but because it fits the vivid imaginations of people who contend that the power of the federal government can only be restrained by killing its agents and representatives.
It is part of the militia-movement folk lore that the Founders enacted the Second Amendment so the American people could rise up against their elected government. Though that is bad history – since the Framers of the Constitution set as their goal “domestic Tranquility” and defined “levying war against” the United States as treason – this false notion that the Framers wanted a violent populace resisting the government has become an article of faith in Trump’s world of political paranoia.
So, when Trump spoke off-the-cuff at a North Carolina rally on Tuesday, it seemed to me that he was referencing the fanciful idea of gun-control opponents waging war on the federal government rather than calling for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, Trump’s short-hand comment was dangerous regardless of which form of violent action he meant. His…