Meet Deadeye
Donald – Gail Collins
MAY 20, 2016
Donald Trump has
a permit to carry a gun.
“Nobody knows
that,” he told a gathering of the National Rifle Association on Friday. Well
actually, it’s pretty hard to not know since he brings it up all the time.
“Boy, would I
surprise somebody if they hit Trump,” he told the audience. People, have we
ever had a president who spoke about himself in the third person? Something to
consider. But more important, what would that surprise entail? Was Trump trying
to say that he’d quickly draw his concealed weapon and take the gunman out of
circulation?
“If I wasn’t — if
I wasn’t surrounded by, like the largest group of Secret Service people,” he
began, and it did sound as if we were about to get a description of his
shooting prowess. But then Trump veered off to demand a standing ovation for
police officers and never did get back to the original point.
Chances are he
couldn’t hit the side of a barn. (If he could, don’t you think we’d have been
forced to watch videos of Trump taking that barn out of commission?) Last
summer, an NBC interviewer asked if he ever used his weapon on, say, gun
ranges. Trump replied that it was “none of your business.”
This is a more
important matter than just the ability to make fun of Donald Trump for
bragging, although that’s pretty enjoyable. The entire mythology of the N.R.A.
and its supporters is based on the idea that if a person is armed, he or she
will be capable of shooting accurately. That the big problem is lack of gun
availability, not gun owners who are sloppy, inept and occasionally psychotic.
If we required
that anyone who wants to buy a gun first demonstrate the ability to hit a
target, sales would plummet overnight.
In his speech,
which came after he received the N.R.A.’s enthusiastic endorsement, Trump
bragged about his sons’ marksmanship. “They have so many rifles and so many
guns, sometimes I even get a little bit concerned,” he said, to rather
uncertain laughter from the audience — the N.R.A. theory is that you cannot
possibly have too many guns. But give credit to Donald Jr. and Eric — they
apparently spend a lot of time practicing. We are not going to revisit the day
they killed the elephant.
The myth of the
masses of skillful shooters is also central to Trump’s much-repeated claim that
terrorists would be deterred if they thought they were going to run into an
armed citizenry. He’s described the way ISIS gunmen in Paris would have been
undone if people at the Bataclan theater had been able to get up and start
firing back — an image that presumes Europeans bearing arms would have the
capacity to stand up in a dark, hysterical auditorium and take out the villains
without mowing down the rest of the audience.
“I can tell you
that if I had been in the Bataclan or in the cafes, I would have opened fire,”
Trump told a French magazine. “I may have been killed, but I would have drawn.”
More likely, he’d
have hit the waiter. It’s very, very hard to shoot accurately when you’re
scared or under stress. Police officers generally can’t do it. There was an
armed security officer at the Columbine shootings, and he couldn’t do it. There
was an armed bystander at the shopping center mass shooting that nearly killed
Representative Gabby Giffords. He said later he was “very lucky” not to have
shot the wrong man.
However, the
N.R.A. vision of the world is one where every shot is true. “Americans use guns
to defend themselves against violent crime more than a million times a year,”
said Trump. This is a fantasy, based on one phone survey conducted in 1992, and
frequently debunked.
And nobody in the
presidential race wants to prevent law-abiding people from keeping guns in
their homes. Certainly not Hillary Clinton, who has been known to brag about
her previous hunting triumphs. She’s probably not very proficient now, but she
could probably still beat Trump in a shoot-off.
At the N.R.A.
gathering, where Clinton was depicted as a near-maniac intent on freeing
criminals, confiscating guns and repealing the Second Amendment, Trump claimed
that “Heartless Hillary” wants to disarm the nation’s grandmothers, leaving
them defenseless against murderers and rapists. He’s had great success tacking
unflattering adjectives on his opponents’ names. Since we’re having so much
trouble keeping track of his own evolving positions, let’s try referring to the
candidate’s prior incarnations as “Previous Donald.”
Previous Donald
told TMZ that he was surprised his sons liked hunting and that he himself was
“not a believer.” He favored banning assault weapons and expanding the waiting
time for gun purchases. Beyond that, the Second Amendment didn’t seem to be a
big issue in his pre-campaign life. Except for a snide reference to Republicans
who “walk the N.R.A. line and refuse even limited restrictions.”
So Previous.
