Even after a shooting at a rally injured Donald Trump on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the GOP is sticking to its guns. “I don’t generally talk about when I carry or not,” Trump senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said at a pro–Second Amendment event in Milwaukee Tuesday morning. “But generally, I do.”

Guns, he said here at the Pfister Hotel, are something of a hobby of his. “If I have 40 minutes or an hour…I go to the range,” he continued. “It’s very therapeutic for me.” But he also emphasized that loosening gun laws would be a priority of a second Trump administration—a task LaCivita suggested that Trump and running mate J.D. Vance would seek to outsource to the judicial branch, which has delivered conservatives a series of high-profile victories in recent years, including with Bruen and other decisions limiting gun control. “The team’s complete,” LaCivita said, encouraging those present at the US Concealed Carry Association event to turn out for Trump, “and we’re coming out pretty fast.”

The former president was among three shot in a Pennsylvania rally shooting Saturday that left one attendee, and the alleged shooter, dead. The suspect, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is said to have fired on the rally in Butler with an AR-15–style weapon—commonly used in the mass shootings that plague this country—and was also reportedly a member of a shooting club near his home. (No motive was clear as of Tuesday; Crooks was registered as a Republican, though reportedly donated a small amount to a Democratic-allied organization in 2021.)

Democratic Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and others called for guns to be banned near the RNC in the wake of the shooting. Firearms are banned in the hard perimeter surrounding the Fiserv Center, where Trump will formally accept the GOP nomination, but allowed in the outer perimeter because Wisconsin is an open- and concealed-carry state, and Milwaukee—under state law—cannot enact its own ban. “We as a city cannot legislate out of that,” Milwaukee police chief Jeffrey Norman said Sunday before the RNC, where some wore shirts proclaiming, “My Guns Are Not Your Problem.”

At the Pfister—a stately old hotel about a mile from the convention grounds, adorned with gold-framed oil paintings on the walls, delicate chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and a grand fresco on the ceiling to commemorate its 1988 centennial—security was intense. A line of people, waiting to clear the metal detectors inside, stretched around the block. What was LaCivita most looking forward to this week? Trump’s speech. Especially after the attempted assassination Saturday, he said, “It’s gonna be amazing.”