Former US President Donald Trump, favorite for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election, declared on Friday that he had defended the right to bear arms during his term and that, if re-elected, he would reverse all of President Joe Biden's decisions. policies.
At a National Rifle Association (NRA) event, where he addressed thousands of supporters, Trump pledged to roll back regulations imposed by the Biden administration, including one that restricted sales of gun modifications known as gun racks. , according to Reuters.
“Every one of Biden's attacks on gun owners and manufacturers will end in my first week back in office, maybe my first day,” Trump said in a speech at the Great American Outdoor show in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. .
Throughout the 2016 election and his presidency, the NRA fervently supported Trump, applauding him when he nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court and taking several actions that the powerful gun lobby had requested. One of them was allowing gun stores to remain open by classifying them as necessary businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Trump has persisted in actively courting conservative gun owners because he believes they are essential to his chances of winning re-election. He boasted that he defied calls to enact gun control laws while in the White House from 2017 to 2021, and told the Assembly on Friday that “nobody will lay a finger on their firearms” if he is re-elected.
“During my four years nothing happened and there was a lot of pressure on me regarding guns. We didn't do anything, we didn't give in,” Trump said.
Republicans, backed by the NRA and other gun rights organizations, are generally against stricter legislation, pointing to the Second Amendment's guarantee of freedom to bear arms. This position has not changed despite a constant barrage of mass shootings and the fact that wealthy nations have the highest prevalence of gun violence in the United States.
During his ninth speech to an NRA audience on Friday, Trump called on his supporters to “flood” the polls in November, acknowledging that he will need to win back the battleground state he lost in 2020.
