On February 10 The Trace claimed Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s pro-gun, anti-gun-free zone message is allowing “disaffected” white men to “reclaim their masculinity.”
The Trace is a journalism outlet with a bent toward gun control. They were launched with “seed funding provided by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and the Joyce Foundation.”
According to The Trace, Trump’s domination in New Hampshire can be explained in part by how his stance on guns and his opposition to gun-free zones gives faltering white men another shot at meaningfulness. The outlet focuses on Trump’s opposition to gun-free zones like the ones that allowed Nidal Hasan to shoot up Fort Hood with impunity in 2009 and allowed Ivan Lopez to do the same in 2014. In both cases, numerous innocents were killed, and Trump promises to do away with gun-free zones on military bases if elected.
And when Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez “opened fire on two [gun-free] military installations in Chattanooga” on July 16, 2015, Trump stepped up to the plate once more. He lambasted the gun-free policies that made four Marines and one Sailor sitting ducks in Chattanooga, and he vowed anew to abolish gun-free zones on military bases if elected.
The Trace goes on to point to attacks in civilian gun-free zones like the Aurora movie theater (July 2012) and Sandy Hook Elementary (2012). They then quote a debunked FBI study released just before the 2014 mid-term elections–a study which claimed to disprove the theory that attackers chose gun-free zones because of the gun-free policies. The study was thoroughly criticized not only because it was contrary to common sense but also because it was contrary to empirical evidence regarding the gun-free status of so many targets of high profile shooters. The authors of the FBI study recanted within a matter of months and essentially admitted they had made up their own data in an attempt to make a point which facts did not support. Yet The Trace quotes the study approvingly in their effort to prove Trump wrong.
Believing they proved him wrong, The Trace then claimed the validity of Trump’s argument is not even questioned by “his followers,” the majority of whom are described as “white, working-class voters” who represent “one of the country’s most disaffected groups.” The Trace described them as people “whose job prospects have been in freefall for decades.”
According to The Trace, Trump gives meaning to these voters again and lets them “reclaim their masculinity.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.