Donald Trump's 2nd Amendment Solutions

We usually don't do this, but the OPJ and I are blogging on the same thing - namely Donald Trump and his Second Amendment solution to a Clinton win in November.

Orange-face comb-over said this:

Hillary wants to abolish -- essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.

First off, there's no evidence Clinton wants to "abolish" the Second Amendment. So there's lie número uno.

Next notice the grammar of the next sentence.  By using "...if she gets to pick..." Trump is saying that this must be after the election since when the only way Clinton could pick judges would be if she were already president.  This exposes the Trump campaign's response:

It’s called the power of unification – 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power. And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won’t be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump.

(Since it seems to be discussing the election - that is, before Clinton would be president, if she were to win) as lie número dos.

In any event 18 U.S. Code § 879 states:

(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully threatens to kill, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon...a major candidate for the office of President or Vice President, or a member of the immediate family of such candidate...shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

So it looks like Trump may have committed a crime - whether he was joking or not.

But here's the thing: this is nothing new.  Look again at what Trump said.  It feeds into the rhetoric we've been hearing about for some time about what the 2nd Amendment is for; namely to protect "us" from a tyrannical guv'ment.

Remember this?  It's only from 5 years ago:

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate turned Republican primary winner in Nevada, has taken heat for a number of extreme affiliations and policy positions. One of the more outlandish was a statement she made during a radio interview last January in which she floated the idea that the public would bring down an out-of-control Congress with “Second Amendment remedies.”

Or this from one of the non-Trumps in the GOP:

It's a given that every Republican presidential candidate will run for president as a strong supporter of gun rights.

But Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is arguing that the Second Amendment includes a right to revolt against government tyranny, a point of emphasis uncommon for mainstream presidential candidates.

"The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution isn't for just protecting hunting rights, and it's not only to safeguard your right to target practice. It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny -- for the protection of liberty," Cruz wrote to supporters in a fundraising email on Thursday, under the subject line "2nd Amendment against tyranny."

So if you think that a Clinton win will lead to Clinton judges outlawing the 2nd Amendment and that that's guv'ment tyranny, then...

Donald Trump is not an outlier on the GOP.  He's not a usurper who's taken over the party.  He's a natural outgrowth (a cancerous one, to be sure) of some of the rhetoric that's been swirling there for some time.

Lucky us.