On Tuesday, Mr Trump falsely said that Mrs Clinton wanted to revoke the right to gun ownership. “Yesterday we witnessed the latest in a long line of casual comments from Donald Trump that cross the line”.
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“I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment”, she said in her Democratic National Convention speech.
At an election rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump said the “Second Amendment people” could stop Clinton from winning the White House and picking new US Supreme Court justices.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks”, he said.
Mr Trump then added: “The Second Amendment people, maybe there is.I don’t know”.
“You’d think it would be pretty simple for a grown man to keep his mouth shut sometimes”, said Seth Walls, 18, a landscaper from Whitetop, Virginia, who attended his first Trump rally on Wednesday.
Defending the comments on Fox News, Trump insisted no one at his rally thought he was saying anything other than that the gun rights movement is effective.
Napolitano said Clinton “made a mistake” with the way she set up her private email server and called the email controversy Clinton’s “Achilles’ heel”.
Republicans have expressed frustration that this story was dominating the political coverage, when Mr Trump could have been attacking Mrs Clinton for emails that have just been released by conservative group Judicial Watch.
But Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr, said: “As the daughter of a leader who was assassinated I find Trump’s comments distasteful, disturbing, and risky”. So does this rise to the level of inciting his supporters to violence against his opponent?
Reuters also reported that a “government official” said the Secret Service had never spoken to Trump’s team about the issue.
“People are grasping at straws”, Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist unaffiliated with Mr Trump said. Clinton, fresh off her own campaign swing in Florida, planned to spend the day in the battleground state of Iowa, where she will tour a Des Moines T-shirt shop and hold a rally.
Republican Party rules and state laws would make it hard at this juncture to replace Mr Trump on ballots ahead of the November 8th election.
Trump Texas fundraising co-chairman Gaylord Hughey called the interpretation of his remark as condoning violence “ridiculous” and “ludicrous”.
Clinton’s campaign announced an outreach effort to woo support from disenchanted Republicans for the Democratic nominee.
To support that, we can examine actual policy proposals that Clinton hopes to enact as president, which would in no way violate the Second Amendment: universal background checks, preventing suspected terrorists from purchasing weapons, reinstating the assault weapons ban, and closing the “Charleston loophole” that allows licensed dealers to sell firearms even if a background check isn’t completed.
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It’s too soon to say if this marks a turning point for the Trump candidacy.
