President Donald Trump will be the first President to speak at the NRA Annual Meetings since Ronald Reagan did it in 1983.
He will speak to the NRA’s 2017 Leadership Forum in Atlanta on April 28.
Breitbart News reported that the NRA endorsed Trump on May 20, 2016, during the 2016 Annual Meetings in Louisville, Kentucky. Thereafter, the NRA campaigned for Trump, and Trump reminded voters again and again that he would work with the NRA to save the Second Amendment if elected.
Trump will now return to speak to the gun rights group that cheered him to victory last year. Bloomberg reports that this will make him “the first U.S. president to address the gun-rights group since Ronald Reagan in 1983.”
Trump’s speech to the NRA will occur two months to the day after he signed a repeal of Barack Obama’s Social Security gun ban which would have allowed the Social Security Administration to strip beneficiaries of the Second Amendment rights without due process. The speech also comes nearly two months after his Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, ended an Obama-era ban against using lead ammunition on federal lands.
On April 13, 2017, Breitbart News reported that the Trump administration has been quietly rolling back other Obama-era gun controls behind the scenes. McClatchy reported that federal agencies have “narrowed the definition of ‘fugitive,’” thereby limiting the number of people prohibited from gun possession because they are included in a fugitive database. Trump “officials have also signaled that they may no longer defend the Army Corps of Engineers’ ban on carrying loaded firearms and ammunition on federal lands.”
Trump’s greatest pro-Second Amendment accomplishment was nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and securing his confirmation. Trump had promised to use SCOTUS to save the Second Amendment from “people like Hillary Clinton,” and Gorsuch is widely viewed as a fulfillment of that promise.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.