After news broke that Trump’s Department of Justice was considering taking away transgender people’s right to gun ownership, I asked the uncompromising National Rifle Association for its position. I didn’t hear back. This morning, an NRA spokesperson sent a link to a statement on Twitter.
Though it took a day to react to a red-line-crossing threat on their bedrock principle (peddling and defending a flawed interpretation of the Second Amendment), it turns out the uncompromising NRA holds an uncompromising position on gun rights.
“The NRA supports the Second Amendment rights of all law-abiding Americans to purchase, possess and use firearms,” the statement read. “NRA does not, and will not support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”
As you can read, the word “transgender” is not in the statement, but the NRA confirmed to CNN that “it was commenting on the Justice Department discussions.” Even for those arch-conservatives, the US government doing a tyranny by “arbitrarily” and selectively targeting a minority group’s gun rights goes too far. From their cold, dead hands, indeed.
And the cold, dead hands of many others. Including transgender people in its definition of Americans is not about transgender rights. It’s about gun rights.
It still has dead kids to answer for, and the expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, and the checks on private gun sales we don’t have, and the decades of gun violence research the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not conduct. Drawing a line in the sand on a blatantly discriminatory law does not excuse a commitment to snuffing out even common sense gun reform.
