Trump and “Death Wish”
by digby
In October of 2015 we had a horrific mass shooting at a college in Oregon that left ten people dead a numerous others wounded. Trump gave a speech the next day in Tennessee.
Here’s a youtube of the six minutes of the speech in which he talked about gun violence. He was having a lot of fun:
Trump said in a rally in suburban Nashville that he has a handgun carry permit in New York. He added that any attacker would be “shocked” if he tried to assault him, because he would emulate Bronson in the vigilante film Death Wish.
Trump criticized “gun-free zones”, saying that the Oregon shootings could have been limited if instructors or students at Umpqua Community College had been armed. He said better mental health care would help curb future shootings.
“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,” he said. “And we have to start looking much stronger into mental health.”
While Trump warned that “no matter what you do, you will always have problems”, he argued that it doesn’t make sense to limit access to firearms.
“It’s not the guns,” Trump said during his hourlong speech. “It’s the people, it’s these sick people.”
“I’m a very, very big second amendment person,” Trump said on Saturday. “This is about self-defense, plain and simple.”
Trump reminisced about Bronson’s Death Wish and got people in the crowd to shout out the title of the 1974 film in unison. In the movie, an affluent, liberal architect embarks on a vigilante mission after his life is shattered by thugs who kill his wife and rape his daughter.
“Today you can’t make that movie because it’s not politically correct,” Trump said.
He even did a little acting, gleefully quoting the thug in the movie saying “I’m gonna cut you up, I’m gonna cut you up.” He’s clearly seen that movie many times.
Trump has not learned a new thing since 1978 and he has not learned anything new about gun violence in the last week. Don’t count on him.
Everyone has to vote out Republicans who are all beholden to the NRA if we want to stop gun violence. And that’s at the state and local level too. But Donald Trump is bought and paid for by the NRA and he will never do anything they don’t want him to do. That’s just a fact.