The NRA endorsed Trump in May. Because he's all they got.

Now that the NRA is openly mocking people who get mugged, it stands to reason that the nation's largest militia group would also feel the time is right to boost the rest of Trump's deplorables with a $6.5 million ad buy.

Starting Wednesday, the NRA is spending $6.5 million on a spot featuring a 26-year-old lawyer named Kristi McMains, who said the pistol in her purse saved her life when a man attacked her in a parking garage. [...] “Every woman has a right to own a gun if she chooses. Hillary Clinton disagrees with that,” McMains says. “Donald Trump supports my right to own a gun.”

No, at worst Hillary Clinton wants authorities to better check whether you yourself are a psychopath before handing that gun over. (And, not for nothing, you might want to check in with our own David Waldman for a running list of reasons why keeping a loaded gun in your purse is a bad idea, but you won't be hearing testimonials from those people in NRA ads anytime soon. The group has a long history of using Anecdote as shield against Data—when they’re not getting Congress to pass laws making it illegal to collect Data to begin with.)

But the NRA has been bleating that insert-Democrat-here is this close to taking all the guns away for decades now. That it hasn't happened yet but still remains an apparently potent argument for them should be evidence enough that their supporters are, and let us not mince words here, deeply stupid. The National Rifle Association looks out for the interests of those very stupid people, and protects their rights to be heavily armed in the midst of the rest of us no matter how astonishingly stupid they are, because otherwise (if we are to trust the words of the NRA leadership, who are very consistent on this point) minorities will show up on your front porch and the gubbermint will be powerless to stop them.

The solution, also insisted upon for decades, is to turn every public interaction into a potential shootout. And then legalize those shootouts. And then militarize the police forces so that they can better protect themselves in an environment in which every public interaction may become a shootout. This will keep us safe, except for all the times it doesn't, which will be the fault of the people who were not carrying guns.

They've been saying all this for decades, but this time they're sure: Donald J. Trump will finally fix things. That Donald J. Trump. The one who hasn’t yet shown evidence he could Leadership his way out of a wet paper bag.