EL NORTE Miguel Domínguez y Rolando Chacón Reynosa, México (12-May-2019).- 00:00 hrs.
El perfil de los migrantes que llegan a las fronteras de Tamaulipas y Coahuila buscando cruzar a Estados Unidos está cambiando con el arribo de cientos de africanos.
En Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros y Piedras Negras ya es común encontrarse con grupos procedentes de Congo, Camerún, Angola y hasta Eritrea, que se mezclan con los centroamericanos tras viajar unos dos meses.
“(Allá) el Gobierno es muy malo. Mata gente y nadie hace nada”, dijo con un inglés apenas audible y entendible “Andrea”, como se conoce a una mujer eritrea que arribó con su pequeña hija al albergue Senda de Vida, en Reynosa.
Como muchos, ella vendió lo poco que tenía para escapar de la pobreza y violencia en su tierra natal en busca de un incierto “sueño americano”.
La ruta que comúnmente toman los africanos inicia en las costas atlánticas de ese continente, de donde se dirigen a Brasil en barco o en avión, de acuerdo con testimonios de activistas y de los propios migrantes.
“De Brasil cruzan hacia Perú, luego a Ecuador, Colombia, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala y México con la intención de cruzar a Estados Unidos”, relató Daniel Campos, del Comedor del Migrante Padre Pepe, en Piedras Negras.
Ya en México, la ruta más común es de Tapachula a la Ciudad de México, y luego a Saltillo.
De ahí hay quienes optan por irse a Piedras Negras, mientras otros avanzan hacia Monterrey en su camino a Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa o Matamoros. Los diferentes grupos de africanos, explicaron activistas, tienden a tener comunicación entre ellos, muchos a través de WhatsApp, lo que les permite identificar rutas seguras y saber en qué tramos deben pagar a “polleros”.
No obstante, hay otros que toman rutas diferentes, como hizo “Andrea”, que asegura haber viajado en barco a Italia y, de ahí, a México.
La mayoría gasta de mil 500 a 2 mil dólares en su recorrido en un inicio, ya que no siempre les alcanza el dinero y luego piden ayuda a autoridades y defensores de los migrantes.
Ya una vez en la frontera, lo común es que no evadan a las autoridades estadounidenses, sino que les pidan asilo.
Pero la llegada a la frontera es apenas la mitad del camino, ya que ahí deben “competir” por las escasas solicitudes de asilo que el Gobierno de Donald Trump da diariamente.
Mientras esperan por una de las menos de 10 peticiones que son procesadas al día en cada ciudad fronteriza, todos los migrantes coinciden: al menos escapan de la pobreza y violencia de sus países.
The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.
And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said in a written statement. “What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”
The report concluded that administration “policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”
HHS spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement that the agency would “review the committee’s findings carefully and continue to work to ensure the best care for the children we serve.”
The report was released ahead of a hearing Thursday before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Portman co-chairs with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). It detailed nearly 30 cases where unaccompanied children had been trafficked after federal officials released them to sponsors or where there were “serious trafficking indicators.”
For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.
A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.
The Senate investigation began in July after federal prosecutors indicted six people in connection with the Marion labor-trafficking scheme, which involved at least eight minors and two adults from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.
One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay. Castillo-Serrano has pleaded guilty to labor-trafficking charges and awaits sentencing in the Northern District of Ohio in Toledo.
The FBI raided the trailer park in December 2014, rescuing the boys, but the Senate investigation says federal officials could have discovered the scheme far sooner.
In August 2014, a child-welfare caseworker attempted to visit one of the children, who had been approved for post-release services because of reported mental-health problems, according to the report.
The caseworker went to the address listed for the child, but the person who answered the door said the child didn’t live there, the report added. When the caseworker finally found the child’s sponsor, the sponsor blocked the caseworker from talking to the child.
Instead of investigating further, the caseworker closed the child’s case file, the report said, citing “ORR policy which states that the Post Release Services are voluntary and sponsor refused services.”
That child was found months later, living 50 miles away from the sponsor’s home and working at the egg farm, according to the report. The child’s sponsor was later indicted.
VanSickle is a reporter for the Investigative Reporting Program, a nonprofit news organization at the University of California at Berkeley.
In a recent op-ed,
fired FBI Director James Comey was back again preaching to the nation
about the dangers of Donald Trump and his capacity to corrupt any
top-ranking federal official of lower character than Comey’s own.
Comey seems to have become utterly unhinged by Donald Trump, especially when the president, in his thick Queens accent, scoffs in the vernacular—quite accurately, given the transgressions of the FBI hierarchy—about “crooked cops.” What an affront to Comey’s complexity, his subtlety, his sophistication, his feigned Hamlet-like self-doubt—at least as now expressed in his latest incarnation as Twitter’s Kahlil Gibran.
One can say a number of things about the timing of Comey’s latest
sermon and his characteristic projection of his own sins on to others.
First, Comey’s unprofessionalism was home-grown and certainly did not need any help from President Trump. His schizophrenic behavior both as a prosecutor and investigator in the Hillary Clinton email matter was marked by exempting Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin from indictment, despite their lying to his own federal officials about their knowledge of a private Clinton email server. Comey wrote his summation of the Clinton email investigation before he had even interviewed the former secretary of state. He was hardly independent from a recused Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Clinton email investigation. As her rubbery courier he bent to her directives on all key decisions that led to de facto exoneration of likely next president Hillary Clinton.
Second, Attorney General William Barr is soon to receive a number of
criminal referrals from Congress, inspectors general, and perhaps other
prosecutors. He won’t allow collusion hysteria to cause him to recuse
himself in the manner in which Jeff Sessions sidelined himself and
elevated Rod Rosenstein.
In anticipation of that bleak reality, Comey seems to be prepping his
own defense by a transparent preemptive attack on the very official who
may soon calibrate Comey’s own legal exposure. Comey should at least
offer a disclaimer that the federal prosecutor he is now attacking may
soon be adjudicating his own future—if for no other reason than to
prevent a naïf from assuming that Comey’s gambit of attacking Barr is
deliberately designed to suggest later on that prosecutor Barr harbored a
prejudicial dislike of likely defendant Comey.
How ironic that Comey who used to lecture the nation on “obstruction”
and the impropriety of Trump’s editorializing about the Mueller
prosecutorial team, is now attacking—or perhaps “obstructing”—the
Attorney General before he has even issued a single indictment.
Three, Comey somehow remains seriously delusional about the abyss between his sermonizing and his own unethical and likely illegal behavior.
Remember, James Comey assured the nation that the Steele dossier,
contra the testimony of his subordinate Andrew McCabe (already facing
criminal referrals) was not the chief evidence presented to a
FISA court. That is likely untrue. And if it is not, Comey’s other
evidence he presented is likely to be just as compromised.
Comey also misled a FISA judge by not admitting 1) that his submitted
dossier evidence was compiled by a contractor paid by Hillary Clinton;
2) that ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s work was unverified; 3) that
Steele’s relationship with Comey’s FBI has already been severed due to
Steele’s unprofessional behavior; and 4) that submitted news accounts of
“collusion” were in circular fashion based on the dossier itself. Had
Comey’s behavior ever become standard procedure in FISA applications,
there could be no longer a FISA court.
Comey also misled about his meetings with President Trump, as
memorialized in his now infamous memos. He briefed the president on the
Steele dossier—without telling Trump that it had been paid for by
Hillary Clinton.
Comey likely also lied in telling Trump he wanted to brief him on the
dossier in worries that the press might otherwise report on it first.
In fact, his meeting with Trump by design was the necessary imprimatur
the press had been waiting for to leak information from the dossier,
which shortly followed.
Comey likely misled the president into thinking both that he was not
under investigation by the FBI and that the FBI hierarchy did not leak
confidential information to the press. In fact, neither assertion was
true; both his deputy Andrew McCabe and Comey himself were chronic
leakers. Comey swore under oath that he had never authorized anyone in
the FBI to leak to the press, while his deputy McCabe swore in contrast
that Comey was well aware that his subordinates were talking freely with
the press in order to leak information selectively.
When he was no longer a U.S. government employee, Comey illegally
took personal possession of at least seven confidential memos of
presidential conversations, written on FBI time and equipment and thus
still government property. He leaked at least three memos that were
likely classified, apparently to seed his narratives to the media and to
prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor as payback for his own
firing.
That trick worked out well, since his friend Robert Mueller was soon
appointed special counsel amid the general Russian “collusion” hysteria
that Comey himself had long ago helped ignite. If any lower echelon
employee had leaked in a similar manner to Comey, he would face an array
of felony indictments.
Comey, remember, on more than 240 occasions reportedly claimed under
oath he could not remember or did not know the answers to questions from
Congressional inquirers. If a private citizen tried that with the IRS,
he world likely face perjury charges.
Comey has never adequately explained his role in inserting FBI
informants into a presidential campaign, and the degree to which his
decision might have been taken in conjunction with other intelligence
agencies or with the knowledge of the then-attorney general or President
Obama. The New York Times of all publications is apparently
investigating the use of FBI informants to sandbag the Trump
campaign—during Comey’s directorship. To my knowledge, no previous FBI
director—perhaps not even J. Edgar Hoover—had unilaterally placed FBI
informants into a presidential campaign during the general election.
One way of looking at John Brennan’s and James Clapper’s nonstop
cable news announcements of Trump’s “treason,” the Comey-McCabe
whirlwind book tours and television confessionals, the Adam Schiff
furrowed-brow predictions of huge bombshells soon to go off, and the
general progressive media hysteria over the last two years or so is to
appreciate a transparent effort at preemptive defense.
That is, Russian “collusion” and its bastard child “obstruction,”
sought to divert attention from massive Obama Administration efforts at
the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and National Security Council to use
the powers of government to first ensure that Trump was not elected and
then, failing that, to distort and ruin his transition and presidency.
The effort initially was so easily green-lighted, because none of
these Washington fixtures had any idea of the nature of the “smelly”
Walmart folks or the supposedly toothless sorts who live apart from the
two coasts, and thus they bet on the wrong horse—convinced that Hillary
Clinton was a sure landslide winner, and their own skullduggery would be
rewarded as loyalty in extremis by someone who trumped them all in
skullduggery.
When Clinton crashed and burned, phase two of the now “resistance”
was comprehensive stonewalling. The culpable adopted a preventative
defense by accusing the very victim of their prior assault of being a
disloyal, unpatriotic victimizer of American institutions—no doubt in
their mind leading to Trump’s emasculation or impeachment and thus their
own exoneration.
For a while, they got away with all that and more as Representative
Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was for a time sandbagged off the investigation
of Russian collusion at the House Intelligence Committee, as Attorney
General Jeff Sessions recused himself, as his conflicted deputy Rod
Rosenstein took over the investigation and may have trafficked in Andrew
McCabe’s melodramatic but ultimately ridiculous coup efforts—and as the
media, in insult to injury fashion, put on television many of the very
principals who had acted so unethically and illegally to contextualize
and analyze their own crimes.
The only remaining mystery of this entire sordid mess is how the
rotten onion will be peeled away. When indictments come down, will the
likes of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson or James Baker or Bruce and
Nellie Ohr be leveraged to inform on the likes of the Brennan, Clapper,
Comey, and McCabe high stratum—that in turn will provide clarity about
still higher officials to learn what Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta
Lynch, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Sally Yates knew and when they
knew it?
In the meantime, expect James Comey to continue his frenetic pace on TV, radio, and in op-eds attacking William Barr and Donald Trump in deathly fear that his illegal behavior may finally have a legal accounting.
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The election of 1980 was a landslide win for the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan. He ran against the Democratic incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, an Independent Illinois Congressman, John B. Anderson, and Libertarian candidate, Ed Clark. Ronald Reagan was the former Governor of California. He also had a successful career as an actor in Hollywood. President Carter was elected in 1977 as the 39th President of the United States. Prior to becoming President, Carter served as the Governor of Georgia and was a member of the Georgia Senate. John B. Anderson had enough popularity that he was considered a solid candidate but ended up receiving no electoral votes and 6.6% of the popular vote. There were several factors that influenced the outcome of the 1980 election but one critical moment was the Presidential debate of 1980 between Governor Reagan and President Carter. This debate coupled with the optimism of Reagan’s campaign and the attacks from Carter’s campaign are major factors that influenced the outcome of the election.
The debates for this election cycle had a rocky start. For the first debate, the League of Women Voters announced that Rep. Anderson would join Governor Reagan and President Carter on stage. Carter refused to participate with Rep. Anderson included and Reagan refused to debate without him. After several negotiations, the League of Women Voters put together a debate that was held on September 21, 1980 in the Baltimore Convention Center. The debate covered several issues and polls after the debate indicated that Governor Reagan had won the debate. In this debate Reagan used the phrase, “there you go again,” in response to an attack Carter was making against him. This had a surprisingly big impact on the debate. Governor Reagan used this phrase to disarm Carter and threw him off his offense. The line became very popular and was used in newspaper headlines and news broadcasts. Another major sound bite from the debate was when Governor Reagan asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” In the debate, he said:
Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?
This idea was a major theme of Reagan’s campaign and was even used as
a campaign slogan. Governor Reagan argued that the Carter
Administration had not been successful and that he would bring change.
The debate was just a week before the election and Governor Reagan’s
statement was a final blow against President Carter. Both candidates
heavily focused on the image of the last four years. President Carter
spent a great deal of time trying to convince the American people that
his last four years had been successful whereas Governor Reagan tried to
show the downfalls of the current administration. This is largely shown
through each candidate’s television advertisements.
President Carter worked hard to try to show that his time in office had been successful and that he deserved to stay. He put out advertisements showing things he had accomplished but also spent a lot of time attacking Governor Reagan. One example of his attempt to diminish Governor Reagan was his advertisement, “Streetgov,” where the campaign interviewed citizens of California who all said they were not happy with Reagan as a leader. President Carter received a lot of backlash for running a campaign that was so focused on attacking his opponent. Many people believed this was a tactic of President Carter’s. By drawing attention to his attacks on Governor Reagan he was taking attention away from the diminishing economy. A cartoonist named Jeff MacNelly depicted this in a cartoon that was published in October of 1980 in the Chicago Tribune. He depicts Carter driving a train that has clearly crashed and is labeled “Economy.” He is the driver and he is saying “Not to change the subject or anything but did you know Reagan is a hate-mongering racist?” President Carter’s attacks became a major focus in the election. To refute the attacks, the Reagan Campaign did something new. They had Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s wife, narrate an advertisement refuting the attacks that President Carter made against Governor Reagan. It was an attack ad made to look like a spouse defending her husband. The advertisement stuck to the theme that was to show the people that President Carter had not been a good president and that Governor Reagan would bring change and optimism. This strategic move worked in Governor Reagan’s favor. It did both, validate the American people who thought Carter’s campaign was being overly attacking and promote the idea that change was needed.
The election was held on November 4, 1980, where Ronald Reagan was
elected president receiving 489 electoral votes and 50.7% of the popular
vote. For the first time since 1952, Republicans had gained control of
the Senate. There were several additional issues that impacted the
election, including the Iranian hostage crisis. The Iran hostage crisis
loomed over President Carter’s chances of reelection. In November 1979,
50 Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. For the
year leading up to the election, President Carter was seen as unable to
solve the problem and get the hostages safely released. This was a major
issues that Governor Reagan worked with to help discredit his opponent
.
The hostages were released on January 21, 1981, after President Reagan
delivered his inaugural address. Reagan was able to make Carter appear
weak between the presidential debate and his rebuttal against Carter’s
attacks through his own advertisements. Though President Reagan won in a
landslide it is important to note that there was a lot of scandal
surrounding his candidacy. A major scandal that some argue could have
had a big impact on the election was the fact that some of Governor
Reagan’s aides had the notes for the 1980 debate from Carter’s campaign.
Because the debate had such an impact on the election it can be argued
that it could have won Reagan the election and had he not have had
access to some of Carter’s notes he may not have done as well. Reagan’s
win was assisted by the events surrounding the Iran Hostage Crisis and
the worsening economy. President Reagan was credited with the release of
the hostages and went on to serve a second term.
Much of Reagan’s address actually had nothing to do with firearms.
Ronald Reagan was the last sitting president to speak at the National Rifle Association’s annual
meeting, addressing its 112th gathering in May 1983, during the third
year of his first term—and a bit more than two years after he was shot
in an assassination attempt. The next to do so will be President Donald
Trump, who will appear at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in Atlanta on
Friday afternoon. It will be his 99th day in office, and just a week shy
of the 34-year anniversary of Reagan’s speech.
“The fact that he decided to address the NRA convention is, I think, very significant and indicates that he still considers the NRA a very important part of his base,” says Dennis Henigan, author of “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”and Other Myths About Guns and Gun Control and a former vice president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “I have no doubt that pro-gun activists are among the most avid Trump supporters, and he knows that and his people know that.”
In
election years, it’s typical for top GOP presidential candidates to
address the meeting, but it’s rare for some presidents—even
Republicans—to do so. Neither Bush spoke to the NRA during their
presidencies, and the elder Bush even cut ties to the NRA
after leaving the White House, following a fundraising letter in which
the group’s leader, Wayne LaPierre, labeled federal agents as
“jackbooted thugs” who robbed citizens of their constitutional rights.
The closest a recent president has come to addressing the meeting was
when the younger Bush sent Vice President Dick Cheney to do so in 2004, as he sought re-election.
Not
surprisingly, given their party’s stance on gun control, Democratic
presidents have been the subject of NRA attacks, so Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama never went near the annual gun convention.
The NRA
long has been a political force that advocates for or against lawmakers,
depending on whether they support loosening gun restrictions. The
annual meeting is a must-attend for politicians who want the s0-called
gun vote. More than 80,000 Americans and 800 exhibitors are expected to
be at the four-day 146th NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits this year,
according to the event’s website.
Newsweek he expects the president “to have as adoring a crowd as he’ll ever have at this function, so he’ll be a happy camper.” But, he adds, “I don’t think what he says on guns is going to be all that interesting. It’s kind of predictable.”
Many rounds of applause should indeed be expected, as the NRA went all in on getting Trump elected. It endorsed him very early—nearly six months ahead of Election Day,
compared with a month before for the 2008 and 2012 GOP nominees, John
McCain and Mitt Romney. In addition, the NRA gave his campaign millions of dollars as its
avid supporters cheered on the candidate when he vowed to abolish
gun-free zones at schools and on military bases, expand gun rights for
law-abiding citizens and even said he could shoot somebody on
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue without losing supporters.
Much of the
rhetoric has changed since Reagan’s time when it comes to guns in
America, as should be evident when contrasting his speech with what
Trump will likely say Friday.
Reagan and Gun Laws
As
Reagan was preparing for his re-election bid in 1984, some in his
administration thought it would be wise to shore up his support of gun
owners, Feldman says. But in the wake of the assassination
attempt, there was some fear within the NRA that he might “go soft” on
the gun rights issue.
That concern wasn’t without
foundation. During the Reagan administration, the Department of the
Interior in the early 1980s restricted the carrying of loaded guns in
national parks and wildlife refuges. About 25 years later, President
Barack Obama during his first month in office overturned that ban.
The
enactment of federal background check legislation and the ban on
assault weapons didn’t come until 1993 and 1994, respectively, during
Bill Clinton’s presidency. Reagan ultimately endorsed the Brady Bill
in the early 1990s (it was, of course, named after his press secretary,
James Brady, who was wounded during the 1981 assassination attempt),
which was a significant step because it gave Republicans in Congress
political cover in supporting the gun measure.
What Reagan Said in 1983
Reagan saluted the NRA during his 33-minute speech
at the Annual Members Banquet in Phoenix—reminding the audience of his
membership—and comforted the gun rights advocates by vowing to “never
disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and
harm.” He also stressed the importance of constitutional freedoms as
“every American’s birthright” and called for harsher punishments for
career criminals. He touched upon other long-standing NRA themes, such
as the view that gun control is the first step toward the total
confiscation of all law-abiding citizens’ guns, and that those who want
to inflict harm on others aren’t fazed by stricter gun laws—a nod to the
assassination attempt in March 1981.
But much of his address had
nothing to do with guns, nor did it emphasize the idea of exercising the
right to carry firearms outside of the home. Instead, with the Cold War
as his backdrop, he discussed, among other things, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and the Salvadoran Civil War.
In
perhaps what was a sign of the times, he also never mentioned the
Second Amendment by name. In avoiding such topics, his speech reflected a
somewhat different era than what we see with today’s ongoing and ever
more partisan gun debate.
“It struck me as a significant
indication of how the gun issue has changed since 1983 and how the issue
is now so focused on the carrying of guns in public places,” Henigan
tells Newsweek. He adds that during the 1980s, “it was pretty
much of a consensus view that there ought to be greater restrictions on
the carrying of guns in public than possessing guns in the home.”
Back then, Americans owned guns largely for hunting and fishing. Reagan even devoted nearly five minutes of his address to touching upon conservation efforts among American sportsmen. Six months later, a photograph surfaced of Reagan aiming a rifle at a window while flying aboard Air Force One during a trip to California.
Reagan aims a rifle at a window while flying aboard Air Force One during a trip to California on November 23, 1983, a bit more than six months after he addressed the NRA’s annual meeting. Ronald Reagan Library
Reagan delivered his speech just a few years before the NRA embarked
on a state-by-state campaign, beginning with Florida, to loosen
concealed gun laws. Now, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., allow
concealed carry in some form. Thirty-eight states generally require a
state-issued permit to carry concealed weapons in public; the other 12 don’t require a permit.
Republican legislators in some of the 38 states are pushing forward
with measures known as constitutional carry or permitless carry.
Where
guns may be carried in public wasn’t such a hot issue in 1983, but it
is now. We’ve seen lots of action in the months since Trump’s
inauguration, with the passage of permitless carry measures in
statehouses across the country and the push at the federal level for national concealed-carry reciprocity (requiring
states to recognize one another’s gun permits), which Trump has
publicly supported. “The thing that’s missing [in Reagan’s address] that
I think you’re probably going to see in Trump’s speech is this
discussion of how important it is that law-abiding citizens be able to
carry guns in the public places,” Henigan says.
At one point,
Reagan advocated for something he knew those in the audience weren’t
likely to support: outlawing armor-piercing bullets. Of these bullets,
he said, “Perhaps there’ll be some disagreement in this, but I have to
say it…. These are designed to truly be a threat to law enforcement
officers who, so many times, have to depend on bulletproof vests.” Three
years later, he signed legislation prohibiting those kinds of bullets.
“Make
no mistake: Ronald Reagan’s speech was pandering to the interests of
the NRA as the corporate gun lobby, but it demonstrated a level of
thoughtfulness that we don’t have any reason to expect from Donald
Trump,” says Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign. “For Donald
Trump, it is very clearly about paying the gun lobby back for the big
investment that they made in his campaign.”
So What Should We Expect From Trump?
This
isn’t even the first time Trump will be addressing the NRA. He spoke at
its annual forum as a private citizen in 2015, shortly before he
declared his intention to run for the presidency, and again in 2016,
after he had officially earned the NRA’s endorsement.
The NRA is preparing for Trump’s speech with a short web video
titled “It’s Morning in America, Once Again,” which plays off of
Reagan’s 1984 re-election commercial that promised a stronger country.
The video highlights parts of Reagan’s speech, as well as Trump’s 2016
address to the NRA. Meanwhile, advocates on the other side are planning a
so-called die-in at a park near the Georgia World Congress Center where
Trump will speak, to represent the Americans who are fatally shot each
day. And Everytown for Gun Safety, along with Georgia lawmakers and
local advocates, will hold a street protest on Saturday morning.
Erich
Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, says Trump likely
will start his address by praising the Second Amendment and the
gun-owning community, and then discuss different gun-control measures
“that make us less safe” and restrictions that “need to be repealed.”
Others
predict Trump will highlight national concealed-carry reciprocity and
the use of guns for self-defense, and for defense against terrorism.
Gross says he expects “a lot of boisterous, inflammatory rhetoric that
is almost in its entirety likely to be misrepresenting of the truth.”
As
a Manhattanite, Trump isn’t exactly from the NRA milieu, and he wasn’t
always an avid supporter of gun rights. (Before he was a presidential
contender, he called out Republicans
who “walk the NRA line” and “refuse even limited restrictions” on
firearms.) “He’s going to be reaching for ways to establish his bona
fides with this group as someone who appreciates the societal value of
guns personally,” Henigan says. On the campaign trail, for example, we
heard Trump continually tout his two adult sons as lifetime members who
are “serious NRA.”
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