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Comment by dicroce | Hacker News Reader

Up until Trump started hinting about assassinating Hilary, I probably would have agreed with you. But he seriously crossed the line their from offensive to dangerous.

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That's such bs. It's a typical Republican talking point: "If you're against people owning guns, you give up your guns first and see what happens". It's not an original or particularly good argument, but you're really straining credulity by suggesting this has anything to do with assassination of his rival.

It was a rhetorical question defending the idea that all Americans, including Hillary, should be able to arm themselves in self-defense. Watch the full source material. "Watch them do X and let's see what happens" is a common form of framing a rhetorical question in New York when complaining about a bad idea. Sure, his mentioning of a specific individual in the context of gun control hypotheticals (instead of using a hypothetical individual) is an insensitive gaffe, but that's really all you can reasonably conclude about the statement.

There are activists who routinely call for mass disarmament of citizens (entirely seriously and not as a form of rhetorical exploration), and it is unreasonable to conclude that the activists are "hinting" at or condone any kind of authoritarianism or genocide that may coincidentally result after such a policy is implemented. Don't muddle the discourse further with similarly unreasonable conclusions.

Except you're ignoring his earlier pronouncement that if she starts picking judges there is 'nothing we can do, except maybe you 2nd amendment guys' (paraphrasing because I'm on mobile)

No one refers to refers to regular gun owners, let alone murderous individuals, as "2nd amendment people". In the context of judges and laws it's clearly a reference to lawyers and lobbyists. The NRA and ACLU have an impressive history defeating legal challenges to the 2nd amendment, such as the no-fly list gun ban debate that happened in the weeks prior to that comment of his. Jumping to assuming that the forces he intended to describe are assassins who pre-empt the presidential appointments is occam's razor territory.

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