Originally at msnbc.com
This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 7 episode of “Velshi.”
If the gun rights lobby has its way, last week’s tragic school shooting in Georgia will be reduced to yet another statistic, dressed up in empty thoughts and prayers. And if Donald Trump returns to office in November, the Republican Party’s unholy alliance with the corporate gun lobby could be cemented into federal law.
If Donald Trump returns to office in November, the GOP’s unholy alliance with the corporate gun lobby could be cemented into federal law.
Both Project 2025 and Trump’s official policy platform, Agenda 47, aim to shield the gun industry with layers of legal protection. While Trump has been trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s far-right manifesto for some months now, the proposals in Agenda 47 mirror Project 2025’s dangerous objectives — and in many cases, go even further.
In fact, Trump campaign officials even acknowledged in 2023, before the public caught wind of Project 2025, that it “aligns well” with Trump’s Agenda 47, which is featured on his campaign website and includes multiple links to the Heritage Foundation’s work. Agenda 47 began rolling out in December 2022 and was followed four months later by the Heritage Foundation’s release of Project 2025 in April 2023.
Taken together, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 would grant the gun lobby essentially everything on its wish list, including making it easier to sell dangerous firearms, weakening concealed carry laws, and overturning state bans on assault weapons.
That’s in spite of the fact that most Americans, including Republicans, support strong gun control laws. A survey from the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans support banning assault weapons, a term used to describe certain semi-automatic weapons including AR-15-style rifles, like the kind used in this week’s shooting in Georgia. Fewer than one-third support allowing expansive gun laws like concealed carry without a permit.
Either way, this has never truly been about protecting Second Amendment rights for ordinary gun owners, despite Republican talking points. It has always been about the GOP’s dangerous alliance with the corporate gun lobby.
That much is reflected in a proposal advanced by the far-right caucus known as the Republican Study Committee, which adopts ideas from both Agenda 47 and Project 2025. That proposal includes the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, the National Rifle Association’s top legislative priority, which would overturn state laws on carrying concealed firearms, and allow guns to be more easily transportable across state lines.
In his Agenda 47 pitch, Trump explicitly states, “I will sign concealed carry reciprocity. Your Second Amendment does not end at the state line.” The law would force each state to recognize the concealed carry standards from every other state — even those states that have dramatically weaker standards and states that don’t require any permit at all.
Gun control advocates describe it as “a race to the bottom for public safety.” According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, it would be no different than:
“Forcing states to let visitors drive on their highways without a driver’s license and without having passed an eye, written, or road test … [Out-of-state] visitors could be armed without being screened by a background check, and law enforcement would have no permit to evaluate.”
Today’s GOP has repeatedly shown its willingness to sacrifice states’ rights as long as it allows them to impose their extremist agenda.
That’s probably why leading law enforcement groups have opposed the legislation. Gun laws are not a priority for voters or even police departments. Instead, it serves mainly the interests of the corporate gun lobby.
The irony here is that this proposed law blatantly disregards state sovereignty, meaning the party that publicly champions limited federal government and states’ rights is violating its own core principles. From reproductive rights to gun control, today’s GOP has repeatedly shown its willingness to sacrifice states’ rights as long as it allows them to impose their extremist agenda on all Americans.
In fact, right now, the gun industry is working in tandem with Republican lawmakers to overturn all state bans on AR-15-style weapons. While the GOP tries to push this legislation through Congress, gun rights groups are suing to overturn Maryland’s ban on assault-style weapons including the AR-15 type, the weapon of choice in American mass shootings.
The conservative Supreme Court is slated to hear the case this fall, after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Maryland’s ban, describing the assault-style weapons as “too destructive for self-defense” and best suited for “wreaking death and destruction.” Federal Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee who authored the majority opinion, quoted a trauma surgeon who likened being shot in the liver by an AR-15 to a watermelon exploding on concrete.
But instead of placing blame where it belongs — on the GOP’s financial benefactor, the corporate gun lobby — Agenda 47 cynically diverts attention by targeting a popular GOP scapegoat: the LGBTQ+ community.
In a section addressing school violence, Trump proposes directing the Food and Drug Administration to assemble an “independent outside panel to investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and ideology increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression, and violence. “However, the Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in 2013, found that the percentage of suspects in mass shootings who are trans is just 0.11%.
The proposals outlined in Project 2025 and Agenda 47 will take a sledgehammer to the already limited gun control measures we have.
Another alarming proposal in Project 2025, which builds on Agenda 47, essentially cripples existing gun control regulations. On page 709, Project 2025 calls for transferring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the agency responsible for regulating firearms, from the Justice Department to the Treasury Department. This shift would dramatically weaken our nation’s ability to enforce gun laws by making it nearly impossible to track the sale of dangerous firearms, leading to increased gun trafficking and making it more challenging to investigate gun-related crimes.
Lastly, Trump’s Agenda 47 calls for arming teachers with guns and supports sending “federal funding to hire … trained gun owners as armed guards in our nation’s schools.” This is despite a John Hopkins survey showing that less than a quarter, only 23%, of Americans support allowing civilians to carry guns on school grounds. The proposal reflects the GOP’s long-standing policy of shifting the responsibility for public safety from the gun industry to schoolchildren and administrators.
In the absence of any real political will, schoolchildren are left scrambling for bullet-proof backpacks and classroom “panic buttons,” among other Band-Aid solutions. And with classrooms increasingly resembling maximum-security prisons, consider this: Project 2025 refers to abortion access as “the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb.”
It seems, though, that once children are out of the womb, the GOP is perfectly content with leaving them to fend for themselves in the face of unchecked gun violence.
The extreme proposals outlined in Project 2025 and Agenda 47 will take a sledgehammer to the already limited gun control measures we have, leaving us scrambling for ever-more inadequate defenses against the uniquely American public health crisis of gun violence.
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