Know what?  Utah and Georgia are in play. And if those two states go blue, there goes the Deep South and the Far West.  Which means that Trump-o the Shlump-o might not win a single state.  And the more he tries to act ‘Presidential,’ the more he’s going to sink in the polls, because if he had behaved like any other politician from the git-go, he wouldn’t have won anything.  Not a single primary.  Nada.

           Now the latest turn of affairs in the campaign is important for the Gun Violence Prevention community because the whole Trump craziness started – remember when? – he was endorsed by the NRA.  An endorsement that in every single Presidential campaign that I can remember always occurred in late October, and this time around took place before the end of May.  Trump the Shlump wasn’t the ‘presumptive’ Republican candidate when he appeared at the NRA shindig in Louisville; he was well ahead in the delegate count but Cruz and Rubio were still viable candidates, at least in their own minds.

And the decision by the NRA leadership to put their weight behind Street Thug didn’t exactly excite everyone in the crowd at the NRA show; there were some boos, some jeers, Chris Cox had to quiet the crowd by telling them that if they wanted someone else to be endorsed, it was ‘time to get over it,’ and Trump’s appearance didn’t exactly signal the beginning of a love-fest, especially when just one month later his comments about armed citizens shooting back in nightclubs was described by Cox as defying ‘ common sense.’

You see, the problem with this particular New York landlord is that no matter how much people may not like Hillary, they seem to like Street Thug even less.  Forget the national polls which are now beginning to give her a seven-point edge; forget the swing-state polls where she’s up by more than ten points; take a look at the most important poll of all, the poll that tracks whether a candidate is liked or not.  Hillary’s numbers are bad; she’s disliked by 11% more than she’s liked.  But Trump’s numbers, to quote Chris Cox again, defy common sense. Try 63.1% to 31.8%, and I’m not talking about favorable to unfavorable – I’m talking the other way around.

So here we have the Dems running the most unpopular candidate they have ever found and the red team produces a candidate who’s even worse.  And he’s so much worse that every day another Republican office-holder comes out and says, sorry, not for me.  And the announcement by Senator Collins was made directly after Street Thug made an attempt to behave ‘presidential’ in his speech on the economy delivered in Detroit.

So what does all this have to do with guns and GVP?  I’ll tell you what it has to do with.  It has to do with the fact that most gun owners are like everyone else.  They dress the same, they work at the same jobs, they watch the same shows and they think the same way.  Are some of the idiots who show up at Trump rallies with ‘fuck Hillary’ t-shirts the same idiots who march into Starbucks with an AR slung over their backs?  I wouldn’t doubt it for a sec.

But I know lots of gun guys; after all, it’s what I do for a living, and a lot of them tell me they don’t like Trump.  Will they vote for him even though they don’t like him?  Probably will because old habits die hard.  No matter what else, Trump’s a Republican and gun guys know that the GOP may no longer be the party of states’ rights, but it’s still the party of gun rights. Which means that there are 91 days until the election and between now and then the GVP folks better not think about anything else.  Better not.