Trump Paid a Visit to Maker of Assault Rifle That Killed 3 People in Racist Shooting
The GOP frontrunner went to Palmetto State Armory—the same company that sold a gun to the white shooter who killed three Black people in Florida in August.
jezebel.com
Former President Donald Trump made a campaign stop at a South Carolina gun store on Monday that was horrifying for multiple reasons: He went with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the store is selling a Glock with Trump’s face on it, and the company also sold a weapon to the racist mass shooter who killed three Black people in Florida last month.
Trump’s visit to the Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina came almost exactly one month after a 21-year-old white gunman shot up a Dollar General store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Jacksonville. The gunman reportedly first went to the campus of a historically Black college nearby but security asked him to leave after he refused to say what he was doing there. During the attack, the shooter texted his father to tell him to check his computer, where he found racist writings but wasn’t able to alert the authorities in time.
It’s unclear if the Trump campaign knew about this connection and chose to go anyway as a fascist wink or if it was pure incompetence. Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote on Twitter: “If not intentional, still grotesque and negligent.” Ifill suggested it may be Trump’s Philadelphia, Mississippi, moment, referring to then-candidate Ronald Reagan giving a 1980 speech on “states’ rights” in the town where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers in 1964.
