Donald Trump Cites ‘Death Wish’ Film to Defend Second Amendment
Just days after Jeb Bush downplayed the need for stricter gun control following the tragic Oregon shooting by stating “Stuff happens,” Donald Trump also made some questionable comments regarding Second Amendment rights during a rally Saturday in Nashville. “I have a license to carry in New York, can you believe that?” Trump said. “Somebody attacks me, they’re gonna be shocked.” The Republican frontrunner then proclaimed his love of the 1974 vigilante film Death Wish, which stars Charles Bronson as an architect hell-bent on avenging the murder of his wife, the Daily News reports.
Trump encouraged the Nashville crowd to repeatedly chant “Death Wish!” before alerting them, “Today you can’t make that movie because it’s not politically correct.” Trump – once an opponent of assault rifles and an advocate for longer waiting periods for firearm purchases – has softened his stance on gun control in recent months to tide closer to the Republicans’ party line regarding the right to bear arms.
“I’m a very, very big Second Amendment person. This is about self-defense, plain and simple,” Trump told the Nashville audience during an hour-long speech. The real estate mogul also criticized the “gun-free zone” at Roseburg, Oregon’s Umpqua Community College, saying the slaying that left 10 people dead including the shooter could have been avoided if instructors and even students were armed, The Guardian writes. “If you had a couple of teachers with guns in that room you would have been a hell of a lot better off,” Trump said.
Instead of suggesting the implementation of some form of gun control, Trump blamed the nation’s mental health care for the rash of shootings. “It’s not the guns. It’s the people. It’s these sick people,” Trump said. “Many states and many cities are closing their mental health facilities and closing them down, and they’re closing them because they don’t have the funding. And we have to start looking much stronger into mental health.”
Trump similarly and pessimistically blamed mental health the morning after the Oregon shootings as well. “It’s not politically correct to say that, but you’re going to have difficulty, and that will be for the next million years, there’s going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks,” Trump said. “What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?”