Last year it was Uvalde. Now it’s Nashville and Louisville. For the second year in a row, the National Rifle Assn. is holding its annual convention within days of mass shootings that shook the nation.

The three-day gathering began Friday with thousands of the most active members at the Indianapolis convention center, attracting a bevy of top Republican presidential candidates enough to help organizations shape the first part of next year’s GOP primary race.

It illustrates the stark reality that such shootings have become enough of the fabric of American life that the NRA can no longer plan around them. It doesn’t really want to either: The convention falls on the second anniversary of the mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis that left nine people dead.

The NRA calls the convention one of the most politically important and popular events in the country, featuring our nation’s top Second Amendment leaders. Indiana Republican Representative Ben Smaltz said he appreciated the organization bringing its convention to Indianapolis for the third time in the past decade and that he thought strong support for gun rights would be key for any Republican seeking to win the party’s presidential nomination.

For the Republicans, the

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The Second Amendment is very important, said Smaltz, who last year was the main sponsor of repeating Indiana’s requirement for a permit to carry a gun in public. “For me personally it is important to talk about the history of our country.

Former President Trump will speak at the rally, his first public appearance since he was arrested in New York last week and charged with felony charges over a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign. His Secret Service protection means attendees can’t have guns at the convention.

Some attendees wore sports-style jerseys with Trump’s name on them, while others scoured the packed vendor hall in red, white and blue tops with the number 2 and amendment on their backs.

Also speaking Friday is former Trump vice president Mike Pence, who is considering his own bid for the White House in 2024. It will be the first time they have addressed the same campaign event on the same day since their estrangement

after follow

the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Two GOP Trump critics former governor of Arkansas. Asa Hutchinson, who announced his 2024 campaign after news of the former president’s indictment broke, and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who may be making his own bid for the White House, will also speak.

Offering video messages are former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who began her 2024 campaign in February; South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who this week announced a presidential exploratory commission;

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and the Governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis, who is seen as a top rival to Trump, even if he has yet to jump into the race.

The convention follows shootings at a Louisville, Ky., bank that killed five people this week and at a Christian school in Nashville, Tenn., on March 27 that killed three 9-year-old students and three staff members.

Pain over both shootings has crossed party lines. Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear spoke about the murder of a friend in the Louisville shooting, while Republican Tennessee governor. Bill Lee said he had friends killed in the Nashville school bombing.

The tone of the NRA convention will nevertheless likely be as defiant as last year, when the group held its convention in Houston just three days after the massacre of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in the Texas town of Uvalde.

Further overlapping with the recent tragedy, Pence and some of the other speakers plan to follow up their NRA speeches by traveling to Nashville to meet the top GOP donors there.

Every major national Republican, every Republican who has thrown his hat in the ring to run for president, is showing up this weekend to pledge their undying loyalty to the NRA and the gun lobby, said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who favored bipartisan legislation which passed last year and imposed some new federal gun restrictions following the Uvalde shooting. Our children are being hunted and the NRA’s business model is to help the hunters.

Support for gun rights among Republican voters remains higher than among voters in general. About 56% of voters in midterm elections last fall said they want to see tougher gun laws nationwide,

although compared to

only 28% of Republicans, according to AP VoteCast, a broad survey of voters.

About half of Republicans think gun laws should stay as they are.

Friday will also see the NRA’s resurgence and the key role it’s poised to play in next year’s presidential race, with a sharp departure from 2020. At the time, the organization was trying to regroup and saw membership and political spending falls after serious legal and financial turmoil, including a failed bankruptcy attempt, a class action lawsuit and a fraud investigation.

Trump, meanwhile, has a conflicting history on guns. The NRA was a major funder of his 2016 campaign, spending some $30 million to support a candidate who at times said he carried his own gun and vowed to abolish gun-free zones in schools and military bases. Trump also promised to introduce a national carrying right.

But

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As the country reeled from a series of mass shootings, the Trump administration banned bump stocks, which were used in a 2017 attack on a country music concert in Las Vegas that left 60 people dead. After the Parkland school shooting in Florida the following year, Trump urged Congressional Republicans to expand background checks and proposed seizing guns from mentally ill people.

He also proposed raising the minimum age for buying assault rifles from 18 to 21

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and suggested he was open to a conversation about reviving the assault weapons ban. However, after a later meeting with the NRA, Trump abandoned his attempt and instead focused on arming teachers and making schools safer.

Donna Alberts, who traveled some 600 miles from Greenbriar, Ark., for the convention, said nothing could affect her vote for Trump in 2024.

He’s a good man,” Alberts said, and he’s doing what he says he’s going to do, and he loves this country.

David Dinn, from Indianapolis, called the audience a lot of good conservatives, clear-thinking people. He said he had voted for the most conservative candidate to be elected.

Gun rights advocates are still celebrating a Supreme Court ruling last June that Americans have the right to publicly carry firearms for self-defense. That opened the door to a wave of firearms restrictions challenges across the country by changing the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating firearms restrictions challenges.

Amid post-ruling turmoil, courts have enacted unconstitutional laws, including federal measures to keep guns out of the hands of domestic violence and defendants charged with felonies, as well as a ban on owning guns with their serial numbers removed. Courts are also considering challenging the state’s ban on AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles.

Efforts to counter gun rights advocates have been an emerging gun safety movement that has poured tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns. So is Moms Demand Action, which was part of a coalition of groups that mocked Friday’s speeches as calling for far-right “presidential candidates”.