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Tag: 2nd amendment
Trump Might Not Accept Election Results, Calls Clinton ‘A Nasty Woman’

Trump Might Not Accept Election Results, Calls Clinton ‘A Nasty Woman’

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Republican candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested he might reject the outcome of the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election if he loses, a possibility his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton called “horrifying.”

In their third and final presidential debate, Trump said he would wait to decide whether the outcome was legitimate.

“I will tell you at the time, I will keep you in suspense,” Trump said.

Clinton said she was “appalled” by Trump’s stance.

“Let’s be clear about what he is saying and what that means: He is denigrating, he is talking down our democracy and I for one am appalled that someone who is the nominee for one of our two major parties would take that position,” she said.

She said Trump, a former reality TV star, had in the past also complained that his show was unjustly denied a U.S. television Emmy award.

“I should have gotten it,” Trump retorted.

In a fiery debate that centered more on policy than the earlier showdowns, Trump accused Clinton’s campaign of orchestrating a series of accusations by women who said the businessman made unwanted sexual advances.

Trump said all of the stories were “totally false” and suggested Clinton was behind the charges. He called her campaign “sleazy” and said, “Nobody has more respect for women than I do, nobody.”

Clinton said the women came forward after Trump said in the last debate he had never made unwanted advances on women. In a 2005 video, Trump was recorded bragging about groping women against their will.

“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self-worth and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like,” said Clinton, the first woman to win the nomination of a major U.S. political party.

She cited other minorities she said Trump had maligned.

“This is a pattern. A pattern of divisiveness, of a very dark and in many ways dangerous vision of our country where he incites violence, where he applauds people who are pushing and pulling and punching at his rallies. That is not who America is,” she said.

Trump entered the debate hoping to reverse his fading momentum in an election that opinion polls show is tilting away from him. The New York businessman has raised concerns by claiming the election will be rigged against him, and has urged supporters to patrol polling places in inner cities to prevent voter fraud.

The two presidential rivals had a tough but issues-based exchanges on abortion, gun rights and immigration during the 90-minute showdown, but occasionally reacted angrily.

Clinton said she would raise taxes on the wealthy to help fund the U.S. government’s Social Security retirement program, but suggested Trump might try to find a way out of paying the higher taxes.

“Such a nasty woman,” Trump said.

Trump, 70, and Clinton, 68, battled sharply over the influence of Vladimir Putin, with Clinton calling Trump the Russian president’s puppet and Trump charging Putin had repeatedly outsmarted Clinton.

Clinton said Trump had refused to condemn Putin and Russia for recent cyber attacks.

“He’d rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence officials that are sworn to protect us,” Clinton said.

U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have said the Russian leadership was responsible for recent cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the leaking of stolen emails.

Trump rejected the idea that he was close with Putin, but suggested he would have a better relationship with Russia’s leader than Clinton.

“He said nice things about me,” Trump said. “He has no respect for her, he has no respect for our president and I’ll tell you what, we’re in very serious trouble.”

Clinton responded: ”Well that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

“No, you’re the puppet,” Trump said. “Putin has outsmarted her and Obama every single step of the way,” he said in a reference to U.S. President Barack Obama, a Democrat like Clinton.

Clinton also said Trump had been “cavalier” about nuclear weapons and should not be trusted with the nuclear codes.

SUPREME COURT

Clinton promised to appoint justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who would uphold a woman’s right to abortion laid out in the court’s 1973 Roe vs Wade decision, while Trump promised to appoint what he called “pro-life” justices who would overturn the decision.

Under existing law, Trump said, “You can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”

“Honestly, nobody has business doing what I just said, doing that as late as one or two or three or four days prior to birth,” Trump said.

Clinton said Trump’s “scare rhetoric is just terribly unfortunate.”

“This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman and her family has to make and I do not believe the government should be making it,” Clinton said.

Trump said he would appoint a Supreme Court justice who would protect American gun rights.

He has said in the past that Clinton wants to “essentially abolish” the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing a right to bear arms.

Clinton said she supports gun rights, but wants additional regulations on guns, citing examples of children being hurt or killed in gun accidents. “I see no conflict between saving people’s lives and defending the Second Amendment.”

Clinton and Trump walked straight to their podiums when they were introduced at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, once again forgoing the traditional handshake as they did at the second debate last week in St. Louis, Missouri. This time they did not shake hands at the end of the debate, either.

The debate gave Trump, making his first run for elected office, perhaps his best remaining chance to sway the dwindling number of Americans who are still undecided about their vote.

Clinton, a former secretary of state, U.S. senator and first lady, leads in national polls and in most of the battleground states where the election will likely be decided. The debate was her opportunity to make a closing argument on why she is best suited to succeed Obama.

Clinton has struggled to get past concerns about transparency raised over her use of a private email server for work communications while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

The two candidates clashed over accusations that Clinton as secretary of state did favors for high-dollar donors to her family’s Clinton Foundation. Asked about a potential conflict of interest, she said she acted “in furtherance of our country’s values and interests.”

She and Trump talked over each other, Clinton defending her ties to the foundation, saying “there is no evidence” of a conflict, while Trump said the foundation should return millions of dollars to countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar who treat gay people harshly.

“It’s a criminal enterprise,” Trump said.

Clinton said she would be happy to compare the Clinton Foundation to Trump’s charitable Trump Foundation, which among its activities was to buy “a six-foot statue of Donald.”

(Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson in Las Vegas and Luciana Lopez in New York; Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Howard Goller)

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks as Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton listen during their third and final 2016 presidential campaign debate at UNLV in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., October 19, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Cartoon: We Don’t Need Gun Control

Cartoon: We Don’t Need Gun Control

NRA Backtracks From Rare Instance Of Making Sense

NRA Backtracks From Rare Instance Of Making Sense

A few days ago, the NRA inadvertently said something reasonable.

This, in response to a series of protests in Texas. It seems advocates of the right to carry firearms openly have taken to showing up en masse at public places — coffee shops, museums, restaurants, etc. — toting shotguns and assault rifles. So say you’re snapping photos at Dealey Plaza, and up sidles some guy with an AK slung over his shoulder.

That sudden dryness of mouth and tightness of sphincter you feel is not reassurance.

“This is terrifying,” a visitor from Washington state told the Dallas Morning News. “We have guns in our house, but we don’t walk around with them. … This is shocking.”

The NRA seemed to agree. In an unsigned online editorial, it stated the obvious, calling the practice of bringing long guns into public places “dubious,” “scary” and “downright weird.”

Days later, having come, well … under fire, from Texas gun groups, the NRA was in retreat, apologizing and blaming this rare lapse of lucidity on a staff member who apparently failed to drink his full allotment of Kool-Aid. The organization assured its followers that it still supports the right of all people to bring all guns into all places.

One gets the sense, when people argue for these “guns everywhere” policies, that they see themselves as restoring some frontier spirit lost in the passage of centuries. A few weeks back, former senator Rick Santorum contended on Face the Nation that “gun crimes were not very prevalent” in the Old West because everyone was armed.

But they weren’t. In his book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, UCLA professor of constitutional law Adam Winkler reveals that gun control in the Old West was actually quite strict. In Dodge City, you were required to turn in your guns when you got to town. The iconic Gunfight at the OK Corral was ignited when Wyatt and Virgil Earp tried to enforce a similar ordinance in Tombstone, Ariz. So the idea that everyone in the Old West was packing is a relic of TV and movie westerns, but it is not history.

And while the modern gun rights movement is usually regarded as a conservative construction, Winkler writes that it was actually born of liberal extremism. It seems that in 1967, a heavily armed group of Black Panthers showed up and walked brazenly into the California statehouse — there were no metal detectors — as a group of children were readying for a picnic with the new governor, Ronald Reagan.

The Panthers saw this as an exercise of their constitutional rights. Reagan and other conservative Republicans saw it as a threat and crafted laws to stop it from happening again. The future president said, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

The point being that what conservatives seem to regard as a mission of restoration isn’t. This idea that everyone in Chipotle’s should be armed is neither some holdover from the Old West nor some time-honored value inextricable from conservatism. No, it is wholly new. And wholly mad.

While some gun rights advocates must know this, they can’t say it in a movement where any deviation from orthodoxy is regarded as heresy. We saw that a few months ago when Guns & Ammo magazine disappeared a columnist who wrote that gun owners should accept some form of regulation. We see it again with this NRA staffer who has been disavowed and presumably sent off to be re-educated.

This self-reinforcing groupthink stifles any meaningful debate on America’s gun problem and speaks volumes about the mind of the gun rights movement. It will fight for you to take an AK into McDonald’s.

But you are not allowed to question whether you should.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier

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NRA Rips ‘Open Carry’ Rallies In Texas

NRA Rips ‘Open Carry’ Rallies In Texas

By Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN, Texas — In a blistering criticism of “open-carry” rallies in Texas, the National Rifle Association said gun enthusiasts who bring loaded rifles and tactical long guns into restaurants and public places are putting the pro-gun movement at risk with “downright weird” behavior.

The gun-toting gatherings are scary, thoughtless and counterproductive “hijinx,” causing alarmed bystanders to question the motives of gun advocates and potentially generating support for restricting gun rights, according to a statement on the NRA Institute for Legislative Action website.

“Using guns merely to draw attention to yourself in public not only defies common sense, it shows a lack of consideration and manners. That’s not the Texas way. And that’s certainly not the NRA way,” said the post, titled “Good citizens and good neighbors: The gun owners’ role.”

The statement, posted Friday but distributed Monday, drew a pointed response from open-carry advocates.

“The more the NRA continues to divide its members by attacking some aspects of gun rights instead of supporting all gun rights, the more support it will lose,” Open Carry Texas said on its Facebook page, adding that several members cut up their NRA lifetime membership cards in protest, posting photos of the result.

Open Carry Texas said the NRA concerns were overblown, noting that gun-toting members have begun asking permission before entering a business and typically send an unarmed person to alert customers and staff in advance.

“It is unfortunate that an organization that claims to be dedicated to the preservation of gun rights would attack another organization fighting so hard for those rights in Texas,” Open Carry Texas said.

Texas law allows gun owners to openly carry rifles. Concealed handguns also are allowed with a permit, but openly displayed sidearms are not legal in most situations.

Advocates in Texas for allowing holstered handguns — a practice most states permit — have drawn attention by bringing long guns to demonstrations in restaurants, coffee shops and store parking lots. A noon parade down Austin’s East Sixth Street turned heads last March during the South by Southwest event.

The goal, advocates say, is to educate Texans about the right to carry firearms and show that armed and responsible gun owners are not a public threat.

But the events have drawn fire from gun-control groups, particularly Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which said patrons and employees should not be forced to determine if an armed group is dangerous or law abiding.

“Assessing an (armed) person’s intent would be difficult for law enforcement,” said Stephanie Lundy with Moms Demand Action’s Texas chapter. “It’s certainly not something that my teenager should be asked to do. It’s also not something that I as a civilian should be asked to do.”

After recent open-carry gatherings in several Texas restaurants, Moms Demand Action pressed corporate officials to create a national policy banning guns in all outlets. Officials with Chili’s, Jack in the Box, Chipotle and Sonic responded by asking gun owners to leave their weapons at home but stopped short of an outright ban.

A Chipotle spokesman, noting that a recent gathering caused “many of our customers anxiety and discomfort,” said company officials “are respectfully asking that customers not bring guns into our restaurants, unless they are authorized law enforcement personnel.”

The statement from the NRA, the nation’s largest gun-rights group and a political powerhouse, showed that not all gun advocates are sold on the tactic as well.

Bringing long guns into restaurants is “downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about your business while being prepared to defend yourself,” the NRA statement said.

“Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done,” the statement said. “If we exercise poor judgment, our decisions will have consequences … such as turning an undecided voter into an anti-gun voter because of causing that person fear or offense.”

But Jason Orsek, vice president of Come and Take It Texas, said organized open-carry rallies will continue. Armed members of the group were in downtown Austin last Saturday distributing food, clothes and toiletries to several hundred homeless people — and like most rallies, the event was held without incident, he said.

“It looks like the NRA caved into pressure from anti-gun groups,” Orsek said. “I’m of the opinion that you either believe in and support the Second Amendment or you don’t. You don’t pick and choose parts of it. The Second Amendment’s very clear.”

Elvert Barnes via Flickr