NRA boosts Trump with battleground state ad
NRA launches $5 million ad buy against Democrat Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada and Virginia.
The National Rifle Association is boosting Donald Trump with a $5 million television advertising buy aimed at smaller markets that serve rural areas in five battleground states, including Pennsylvania.
Called "Nightstand," the group's ominous ad shows a woman asleep in her bed as an intruder breaks into her home. Hearing the glass shatter she runs to the phone to call 9-1-1 – a narrator says that the average response time is 11 minutes – and moves to unlock a handgun from a gun safe on the nightstand. The safe disappears, the phone handset drops to the floor, and the commercial cuts to a shot of a home wrapped in crime-scene tape with police cruisers in front of it.
"Hillary could take away her right to self-defense," a woman narrator says. "And with Supreme Court justices, Hillary can. Don't let Hillary leave you protected by nothing but a phone."
Half of the $5 million buy will be spent on broadcast affiliates in rural areas of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia. The rest will run on national cable, as well as the satellite services Dish and Direct TV, which have big rural subscriber bases.
Clinton has criticized a landmark 5-4 Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, which found that the right to bear arms is an individual right, rather than a communal one necessary to having a militia for the common defense.
The Democratic nominee also favors expanded background checks for the purchase of firearms and other restrictions, though she has not advocated confiscation of guns, as many gun-rights advocates charge.
"Hillary Clinton is an elitist, out-of-touch hypocrite who believes in one set of rules for her, and a different set of rules for the rest of us," said Chris Cox, chairman of the NRA's Political Victory Fund. "This ad underscores that fact. Law-abiding Americans should not have a president who would leave them defenseless."
There is one vacancy on the high court, and the possibility of several retirements in the next president's term of office.