Trump weighs in on call to allow guns at GOP convention
GOP front-runner Donald Trump said Sunday that he will take a closer look at an online petition calling for the Republican convention this summer to allow guns into the convention space has received tens of thousands of signatures on Change.org.
The petition notes that Ohio is an open-carry state, but that the website for the Quicken Loans Arena--the site of the convention in Cleveland--says the venue forbids "firearms and other weapons of any kind."
"This is a direct affront to the Second Amendment and puts all attendees at risk," the petition reads. "As the National Rifle Association has made clear, 'gun-free zones' such as the Quicken Loans Arena are 'the worst and most dangerous of all lies.'"
Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Trump called himself "a very, very strong person for Second Amendment," said a question about the petition was "the first [he'd] heard of it" but that he would plan to read and consider it.
"I have not seen the petition," he said. "I want to see what it says. I want to read the fine print."
It also calls on Ohio Gov. John Kasich, himself a GOP presidential hopeful, to use executive authority as governor of Ohio to override the "gun-free zone" at the convention site, and on Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to offer "an explanation of how a venue so unfriendly to Second Amendment rights was chosen for the Republican Convention."
Petitioners are also looking for a contingency plan for an alternate location from the RNC should guns not be allowed in the Quicken Loans Arena this July.
As of midday Sunday, the petition had more than 33,000 signatures.
Regardless of the rules for the venue itself, security at national political conventions is always tight: in Tampa in 2012, convention-goers had to go through multiple security checkpoints and metal detectors to get into the convention space. They were also not allowed to bring firearms in with them.
A spokeswoman for the Republican Convention's host committee told the Akron Beacon Journalthat the U.S. Secret Service is handling security plans for the event in conjunction with local, state and federal authorities, and that they will be "continuously refining security plans leading up to the national convention."