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Trump pledges nationwide concealed carry in 2nd Amendment policy paper
// Personal Liberty Digest™
You wouldn't have known it from watching the Big Three news networks over the weekend, but Donald Trump released a policy paper late last week that affirms his position on 2nd Amendment rights.
Trump's plan, titled "Protecting our Second Amendment rights will make America great again," starts unequivocally. "The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear," its first sentence reads. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period."
From there, Trump expands into the policy arena, proposing a "National Right to Carry" law that wouldn't allow states to pick and choose portions of the 2nd Amendment to abrogate — as they routinely do now.
"The right of self-defense doesn't stop at the end of your driveway. That's why I have a concealed carry permit and why tens of millions of Americans do too," Trump asserts. "That permit should be valid in all 50 states. A driver's license works in every state, so it's common sense that a concealed carry permit should work in every state. If we can do that for driving — which is a privilege, not a right — then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege."
Trump also calls the banning of firearms from military bases and recruitment centers "ridiculous" and describes encroachments such as assault weapons bans and limitations on magazine size as "a total failure."
"Opponents of gun rights try to come up with scary sounding phrases like 'assault weapons', 'military-style weapons' and 'high capacity magazines' to confuse people," Trump states. "What they're really talking about are popular semi-automatic rifles and standard magazines that are owned by tens of millions of Americans. Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own."
While he doesn't suggest the abolition of background checks — already considered an infringement on 2nd Amendment rights by Constitution-minded gun owners — Trump does emphasize that there's no need to keep expanding them:
[T]he overwhelming majority of people who go through background checks are law-abiding gun owners. When the system was created, gun owners were promised that it would be instant, accurate and fair. Unfortunately, that isn't the case today. Too many states are failing to put criminal and mental health records into the system — and it should go without saying that a system's only going to be as effective as the records that are put into it. What we need to do is fix the system we have and make it work as intended. What we don't need to do is expand a broken system.
Whoever helped Trump write this paper understood that people who are passionate about their right to bear arms are also well versed in the philosophy of why that right is so inalienable. At the outset of the paper, he makes sure to emphasize the spirit in which the 2nd Amendment was written into the Bill of Rights, so that readers will understand that he understands — that, when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, at least, he gets it. Trump doesn't get into the extent to which he believes the 2nd Amendment ensures against an oppressive government, but he appears to allude to it.
"The Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right that belongs to all law-abiding Americans. The Constitution doesn't create that right — it ensures that the government can't take it away," the paper states. "Our Founding Fathers knew, and our Supreme Court has upheld, that the Second Amendment's purpose is to guarantee our right to defend ourselves and our families. This is about self-defense, plain and simple.
"It's been said that the Second Amendment is America's first freedom. That's because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms protects all our other rights. We are the only country in the world that has a Second Amendment. Protecting that freedom is imperative."
Read the whole thing here.
The post Trump pledges nationwide concealed carry in 2nd Amendment policy paper appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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