“My hat’s off to you,” Harwood, 66, a retired engineer from Dunlap, Illinois, said to Donald Trump Jr. “I don’t know how your family puts up with it.”
The encounter, while brief, managed to capture the prevailing spirit of the four-day convention, which drew roughly 75,000 attendees to Dallas from across the United States: being pro-gun and pro-Trump, feeling on the attack and under attack, all at once.
“We love our guns,” Harwood said. “We love our president. We love our country. We want the nonsense to stop.”
This year’s convention, which ends Sunday, was held seven months after one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, in Las Vegas. It came six months after the nation’s worst church shooting, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and 11 weeks after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It took place blocks from where a gunman killed five Dallas police officers in 2016, and days after the funeral for another slain officer, Rogelio Santander Jr., who was shot on April 24.
Inside the event, which was booked in 2012, children played with AR-15-shaped balloons. A packed arena cheered country-music songs one minute and videos denouncing the news media the next. One man who was asked about gun control gave his answer by pointing to his trigger finger.
There was the young protester who marched and chanted outside the convention her relatives were attending. The Democratic mayor of Dallas who tried to accommodate all sides, all while being a gun owner himself. And there were NRA members who defied political stereotypes.
“I voted for Hillary,” said Gene Heafner, 62. He was a retired construction worker from rural Godfrey, Illinois; an NRA member for decades; and a Democrat. Asked who makes up the NRA, he replied: “Go look in the mirror. We’re just like you.”
