By Jill Colvin -
The Associated Press
Former President Donald Trump told thousands of members of the National Rifle Association on Friday that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he returns to the White House, and boasted that during his presidency he did nothing to reduce the use of weapons.
“During my four years nothing happened.
And there was great pressure on me related to firearms.
We did not do anything.
We did not give in,” he declared in his late-night speech at the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg.
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Billing himself as “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House,” Trump pledged to continue protecting gun owners' rights even as the
United States endures a crisis of gun violence
and mass shootings that have left more than 3,000 dead since 2006.
“Your Second Amendment (constitutional) will always be safe with me as your president,” he asserted.
Following another win in the Nevada caucuses on Thursday night, Trump used the NRA forum to emphasize his support for gun rights, a top priority for Republican voters.
The issue is also highly relevant to Democrats, as well as younger voters, who grew up participating in active gunman drills and have witnessed a series of school shootings in recent years.
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Next week will be the sixth anniversary of one of those shootings: the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people died.
When he was president, Trump had to deal with what happened in Parkland and other mass shootings, and at times pledged to strengthen gun laws, but later backed off.
At a meeting with survivors and family members of the 2018 Parkland massacre, Trump promised to be “very strict on background checks” and later scolded a Republican senator for “being afraid of the NRA,” claiming he would stand up to gun supporters and would finally achieve results in ending gun violence.
But he later backed down after meeting with the association, expressing support for modest changes to the federal background check system and for teachers to carry guns.
At that time he said in a post on the social network still known as Twitter that the issue did not have “much political support (to put it subtly).”
In December 2018, his Government banned
bump stocks
, accessories that allow semi-automatic weapons to be fired as if they were machine guns and which were used during the October 2017 massacre in Las Vegas.
Trump's appearance Friday in Pennsylvania, a crucial and hotly contested state, came as the Republican nomination race he has led shifts to South Carolina.
The February 24 primaries in that state could be the last opportunity for Nikki Haley, Trump's only remaining rival, to try to stop the former president's progress towards the presidential nomination.