Donald Trump's '2nd Amendment' Quote Followed President Obama's Warning

Shortly after Donald Trump made his comments about "Second Amendment people" taking care of Hillary Clinton, the GOP candidate and his surrogates pivoted into what-really-happened mode, rejecting claims he had tacitly called for the shooting of his political opponent.

That's what things have come to.

Regardless of what he meant by his remarks, more important is how they'd be interpreted. There's a reason political candidates are careful with their language, particularly when addressing gun issues: Because careless words can easily prove toxic.

President Obama warned about it weeks go.

First, here are the Trump words that started everything, delivered Tuesday at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and 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.

Critics pounced. Given the recent history of carnage caused by unstable gun owners, Trump was criticized for being careless at best, dangerous at worst.

A campaign statement said he had been talking about Second Amendment supporters organizing for him.

Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said, “He was saying what could ... He doesn’t want [violence] to happen."

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said it "sounds like a joke gone bad."

Those explanations, and the need for them, could have been avoided had Trump taken just a bit of advice from Obama, who has been concerned about the loss of civility in politics and how that can influence others.

During an address to the nation less than a month ago, after three Baton Rouge police officers were killed in the line of duty, the president said:

We have our divisions, and they are not new. Around-the-clock news cycles and social media sometimes amplify these divisions, and I know we’re about to enter a couple of weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual.

And that is why it is so important that everyone -- regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organizations you are a part of -- everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further. We don’t need inflammatory rhetoric. We don’t need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts -- all of us...

...Someone once wrote, “A bullet need happen only once, but for peace to work we need to be reminded of its existence again and again and again.”

You have to go back only a few years to see that quote in action.

Six years ago, a pro-Sarah Palin super PAC put out an infographic encouraging people to vote against representatives who voted for Obamacare. Among the posters, one showed rifle crosshairs over Arizona, home to Rep. Gabby Giffords.

Announcing the map to her Twitter followers, Palin said, "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" The statement was at least as provocative as Tuesday's Trump quote.

Giffords was shot in the head and critically injured in an ambush less than a year later. Six other people were killed, and 13 were wounded.

The shooter's motives, political or otherwise, are still unclear. But here's what Giffords wrote about the incident and the recent death of Jo Cox, a British politician killed after particularly incendiary comments from her opponents:

Politics didn’t kill Jo Cox — a deranged man with a gun and a knife did — or injure me, but when some of the great democracies in the world are held hostage to extremist rhetoric and the fear of attacks on individuals, and when sick people have ready access to weaponry, we are all less safe.

Image via the White House