LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Guns are going to be on the ballot like never before this November.

With Newtown and a wave of fatal clashes with police seared into the nation’s memory, Democrats and Republicans alike are eager to wage the fight over guns during the general election, and both sides forcefully flashed their rhetorical ammunition in recent days.


Donald Trump was warmly — if a bit warily — received Friday as 80,000 members of the National Rifle Association gathered here to launch a united front against Hillary Clinton, whom they see as a bigger threat to the Second Amendment than Trump would ever be.

The Manhattan billionaire echoed the group’s charge that Clinton would “take your guns away from you,” both through her own actions and with her Supreme Court picks, all while failing to keep Americans safe from terrorists abroad and violent criminals at home.

Clinton leapt at the chance to rile up Democrats. She responded Saturday with her own broadside against the gun lobby and Trump, saying his candidacy would put “more kids at risk of violence and bigotry.”

Neither candidate can move to the center on guns as they pivot to the general election: Clinton because it marked one of the few issues where she could run to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ left, and Trump because the gun rights movement is leading the charge for GOP unity around his candidacy.

And they don’t want to.

Both sides are mobilizing with relish, with the NRA and Clinton finding each other convenient foils as they try to rally their bases following bruising primaries.

“Hillary, you picked this fight, but mark my words, we will win it,” said top NRA strategist Chris Cox on Saturday. On Friday, Cox opened the group’s annual meeting by announcing a formal endorsement of Trump, who has embraced the group’s cause of protecting and expanding gun rights. But the main emphasis of the first two days of the conference was on caustic and often personal attacks against Clinton.

Indeed, her full-throated advocacy for gun control is unprecedented for a Democratic presidential candidate (and for her, for that matter), and Democrats down ballot are increasingly following her lead. While she has not called for abolishing the Second Amendment, as Trump has charged, she’s pushed hard for “common sense gun laws,” including expanded background checks. She has made exposing the gun industry to liability a central plank of her Democratic primary campaign against Sanders, whose home state of Vermont highly values its gun rights.

It’s a clear shift in tone and emphasis from 2008, when she described herself as a pro-gun churchgoer after Barack Obama was caught on tape ahead of the Pennsylvania primary criticizing working-class people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

On Saturday, Clinton used the issue to make her case against Trump in the battleground state of Florida, and cast the NRA’s target on her back as a badge of honor.

“Unlike Donald Trump, I will not pander to the gun lobby, and we will not be silenced and we will not be intimidated,” Clinton said Saturday evening at a Trayvon Martin Foundation event in Fort Lauderdale.

Although NRA members have a reputation for voting on the Second Amendment, and President Barack Obama has urged people who want new gun restrictions to become “single issue voters,” both sides are weaving guns into a broader negative narrative about how their opponent is creating a more dangerous — and unequal — world.

“No guns on the other side” was Trump’s refrain on Friday, describing defenseless victims of terror attacks and mass shootings. He debuted a new nickname for Clinton — “Heartless Hillary” — as he accused her of wanting to take guns from women, even as her own security detail (a United States Secret Service force similar to the one that protects him) is armed.

“In trying to overturn the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton is telling everyone — and every woman living in a dangerous community — that she doesn’t have the right to defend herself,” Trump said.

NRA members waiting for Trump to take the stage watched videos warning about the threat from “radical Islamic terrorism” and calling out “self-serving politicians … who would condemn America’s police” as images of Clinton flashed across the screen. That same stage featured Mark “Oz” Geist, a security contractor at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, who has become a chief critic of Clinton’s handling of the deadly attack in 2012.

“We were faced with an evil that night that wanted to take away our way of life,” said Geist. “I think with this election, it’s not that different.”

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre wove in other social issues.

“Rising ISIS attacks, terrorism in Europe, innocent children being slain in our cities by murderers the White House refuses to take off the streets before they kill, ever-growing serious threats to our nation, and the president’s biggest concern is school bathrooms?” LaPierre said Friday. “That is what a Clinton White House looks like, and more.”

There was no attempt to clean up Trump’s record on guns, including now-abandoned positions staked out in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” in which he backed an assault weapons ban and supported longer waiting periods to buy guns. For the group’s leadership, Trump’s record doesn’t matter much when Clinton’s is so clear, and to them so clearly bad.

Clinton, meanwhile, used Trump’s newfound embrace of the NRA and his call to end gun-free zones to cast him as a reckless bully and a hypocrite.

“Parents, teachers and schools should have a right to keep guns out of classrooms — just like Donald Trump does at many of his hotels, by the way,” Clinton said Saturday. “This is somebody running for president of the United States of America, a country facing a gun violence epidemic, and he is talking about more guns in our schools, he is talking about more hatred and division in our streets, even more nuclear weapons in the world. That’s no way to keep us safe.”

In the hours leading up to Clinton’s speech, her campaign sent out fundraising pitches from former Rep. Gabby Giffords and Erica Smegielski, the daughter of the principal killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, asking supporters to stand with Clinton against Trump and the NRA.

For almost two decades, many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, blamed the assault weapons ban for their devastating losses in the 1994 midterms. That all changed when a gunman slaughtered 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, in late 2012, Democrats and gun control advocates say. While they failed to pass expanded background checks in its wake — a victory for the NRA and its impassioned membership in the face of overwhelming approval for the measure in polls — Democrats hope the issue will help them up and down the ballot in November.

“We are pushing hard towards the tipping point,” Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.), who represents Newtown, said Friday in a call with reporters and activists organized by the Democratic National Committee. “This is the first presidential election” she added, in which gun safety legislation “has been a top-tier issue.”

Other factors could help Democrats make guns a winning issue for them in November, including money and research from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and organization from Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions, which is endorsing candidates.

But so far, the NRA appears to be more aggressive in using another tool for maintaining intensity: the fight over the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Before endorsing Trump, Cox played two clips of Clinton remarks in the arena. One, from February, showed her barking like a dog. The other was a recording from a private fundraiser in October saying, “The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get.”

Cox warned, “She’ll put a radical, anti-gun activist in Scalia’s seat as soon as she can.”

Trump echoed the point and called on Clinton to follow his lead by releasing a list of her potential Supreme Court nominees.

Even as Trump and Clinton called each other dangerous hypocrites based on their gun policies, they do present a stark choice for American voters on the substance of gun policy.

“Folks are getting tired of personality contrasts,” Esty said. “And we are going to have core contrast on this issue.”