Project 2025 and Trump's plan to give the gun lobby everything on its wish list

This is an adapted excerpt from the 7 September Episode of “Velshi”.

If the gun rights lobby has its way, the tragic Georgia school shooting will become another statistic glossed over with empty thoughts and prayers. And if Donald Trump returns to office in November, the Republican Party's unholy alliance with the gun lobby could be enshrined in federal law.

Both Project 2025 and Trump's official policy program, Agenda 47, aim to shield the arms industry through multiple legal protections. While Trump has been trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation's far-right manifesto for several months, Agenda 47's proposals reflect the dangerous goals of Project 2025 – and in many cases go even further.

In fact, in 2023, before the public got wind of Project 2025, Trump's campaign staff even acknowledged that it “aligned well with Trump's Agenda 47,” which is featured on his campaign website and includes several links to the Heritage Foundation's work. The rollout of Agenda 47 began in December 2022, and was followed four months later by the Heritage Foundation's release of Project 2025 in April 2023.

Taken together, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 would essentially everything The Republicans' wish list includes making it easier to sell dangerous firearms, relaxing concealed carry laws and lifting state bans on assault weapons.

This is despite the fact that most Americans, including Republicans, support strict gun control laws. A Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans support a ban on assault rifles. Assault rifles are used to describe certain semi-automatic weapons, including AR-15-style rifles like those used in the Georgia shooting this week. Less than a third support allowing sweeping gun laws such as concealed carry without a permit.

Whatever the case, it was never really about protecting gun ownership under the Second Amendment, no matter what arguments Republicans put forward. It was always about the dangerous alliance of Republicans with the gun lobby.

This is also reflected in a proposal from the far-right Republican Study Committee, which takes ideas from both Agenda 47 and Project 2025. The proposal includes the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, the National Rifle Association's top legislative priority. It would repeal state laws on concealed carry of firearms and make it easier to transport weapons across state lines.

In his Agenda 47 campaign, Trump explicitly states, “I will sign concealed carry reciprocity. Your Second Amendment does not end at the state line.” The law would force every state to recognize the concealed carry standards of all other states – even those states that have dramatically weaker standards and states that do not require a permit. at all.

Gun control advocates describe it as “a race to the bottom for public safety.” According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, it would be no different than:

“States are being forced to allow visitors to drive on their highways without a driver’s license and without passing a vision, written or practical test… [Out-of-state] Visitors could be armed without a background check and law enforcement would not have permission to check.”

That's probably why leading law enforcement groups oppose the bill. Gun control laws are not a priority for voters and police departments. Instead, they primarily serve the interests of the gun lobby.

The irony is that this bill blatantly disregards state sovereignty. That is, the party that publicly advocates for a limited federal government and states' rights is violating its own core principles. From reproductive rights to gun control, today's Republican Party has repeatedly shown that it is willing to sacrifice states' rights so long as it can force its extremist agenda on all Americans.

In fact, the gun industry is currently working hand-in-hand with Republican lawmakers to repeal all state bans on AR-15-style weapons. While Republicans are trying to push this bill through Congress, gun rights groups are suing to overturn Maryland's ban on assault rifles, including the AR-15, the weapon of choice in American mass shootings.

The conservative Supreme Court is set to hear the case in the fall after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Maryland's ban, saying the assault rifles are “too destructive for self-defense” and best suited to “cause death and destruction.” Reagan-appointed federal judge Harvie Wilkinson, who wrote the majority opinion, quoted a trauma surgeon who compared being shot in the liver with an AR-15 to a watermelon exploding on concrete.

But instead of putting the blame where it belongs—on the Republicans’ financial benefactor, the gun lobby—Agenda 47 cynically diverts attention by targeting a favorite Republican scapegoat: the LGBTQ+ community.

In a section dealing with violence in schools, Trump proposes directing the Food and Drug Administration to assemble an “independent outside panel to study whether hormone treatments and ideologies used by transgender people increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression and violence.” However, the Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in 2013, found that transgender people make up just 0.11% of suspects in mass shootings.

Another alarming proposal in Project 2025, which builds on Agenda 47, essentially cripples existing gun control regulations. On page 709, Project 2025 calls for transferring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the agency responsible for regulating firearms, from the Department of Justice to the Department of the Treasury. This shift would dramatically weaken our country's ability to enforce gun laws by making it nearly impossible to track the sale of dangerous firearms, leading to an increase in gun trafficking and making it harder to investigate gun crimes.

Finally, Trump's Agenda 47 calls for arming teachers with guns and supports providing “federal funds to hire trained gun owners as armed guards in our nation's schools.” This despite a John Hopkins University poll showing that less than a quarter, just 23 percent, of Americans support allowing civilians to carry guns on school grounds. The proposal reflects longstanding Republican policy of shifting responsibility for public safety from the gun industry to students and school administrators.

In the absence of real political will, schoolchildren must seek out bulletproof backpacks and classroom “panic buttons,” among other makeshift solutions. And as classrooms increasingly resemble maximum security prisons, consider this: Project 2025 calls access to abortion a “grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb.”

It seems, however, that once the children are out of the womb, Republicans are quite content to leave them to fend for themselves in the face of unchecked gun violence.

The extreme proposals of Project 2025 and Agenda 47 will further erode our already limited gun control measures and force us to find increasingly inadequate defenses against the gun violence-related health crisis that is specific to America.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com.