Donald Trump’s controversial “Second Amendment people” comment may have left him gobsmacked, but Darrell Vickers said Wednesday he’ll still be voting Republican in November.
His bearded jaw dropped as Trump made the comments about gun rights supporters and the image, captured by TV cameras, quickly spread across the internet, cited as evidence that people in the room understood Trump to be suggesting “second amendment people” could take care of Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” Trump had said.
Trump said Tuesday evening that he was simply trying to unify gun owners against Clinton in the voting booth.
Vickers said Wednesday on CNN he would have liked to take the Republican Party’s presidential nominee “to the shed” for his remarks about the right to bear arms, which many political observers construed as a threat of violence against Clinton.
Vickers said he thought Trump was making a joke.
“Well, I was thinking exactly what I said to my neighbor, Connie, and that was: ‘I can’t believe he said it, the media will have a field day with this one,’ ” Vickers told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on “Newsroom.” “I was absolutely taken aghast.”
Yet the Oak Island resident defended Trump’s comment on Wednesday, saying the real estate mogul had “a very unique personality” and often made jokes “off the cuff.”
“We (people in the South) may do things in private, we may go to the shed and drink some moonshine or something like that, but we would have taken Mr. Trump to the shed and said ‘don’t say things like that because people will misconstrue it,’ ” Vickers said. “But it was clear to my mind and the people around me that he was trying to make a joke.”
While Vickers had been undecided about Trump before the rally, he said he now supported the Republican nominee.
“I wanted to see the man’s character,” he said. “Yes, I will, I absolutely will (vote for him) because I believe he has the kind of integrity that we need in this country and he’s honest and I am convinced he has the moral fiber to lead this country.”