Ahead of former President Trump’s visit to Harrisburg on Friday to address the annual gathering of the National Rifle Association, the Democratic National Committee placed a billboard at the intersection of S. Second and Mulberry streets featuring some of the former president’s words.
“Donald Trump to gun violence victims: ‘Stop it,’” the sign reads, a reference to Trump’s comments in January after school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in which a sixth-grade student and the teenage shooter were killed and five others were injured. The school the director later died about the injuries he suffered in the shooting.
IN Iowa election rallyOn Jan. 5, Trump began by offering “support and deepest condolences” to the victims and their families. “It’s just awful, so surprising to see this here,” Trump continued. “But we have to deal with it, we have to move forward.”
Trump, the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, is scheduled to deliver a speech at the NRA Presidential Forum at the Great American Outdoor Show, an annual event that drew 200,000 attendees last year, the organization said. It is Trump’s first scheduled visit to Pennsylvania in 2024, a state he won in 2016 but lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.
This is the eighth time Trump has addressed the NRA, according to the organization, which says the former president “has never let down NRA members,” including appointing three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. All three of Trump’s nominees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — played a role in the court’s 2022 ruling that invalidated New York’s law requiring people to demonstrate a need to carry weapons in a public place.
“Americans need common sense solutions to make our communities safer, but Donald Trump believes that victims of gun violence need to simply ‘get over it,’” DNC press secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “This disgusting behavior is what we’ve come to expect from Trump, who campaigned on a dangerous and unpopular agenda that included putting more guns in schools and rolling back bipartisan gun safety legislation.”
This article was updated on February 9, 2024 at 10:28 am.
