Today, Kaine supports same-sex marriage. He remains personally opposed to abortion, but says he supports the right of women to terminate their pregnancies.

Kaine has always believed in the right to bear arms, but with limits that made no sense to accentuate in 2005 Virginia because he was already considered too progressive, Turnage said. “He was not willing to add more bricks to that side of the scale,” he said.

For Randall, who leads one of a small but growing number of groups organising and training for the armed self-defence of black areas, the stakes are high. Only 10 days before our sit-down, a young black man named Micah Johnson shot 14 police officers in the downtown area, killing five. The increasing friction between the black community, the police, and rightwing or white supremacist activists who’ve been drawn to Dallas in the wake of the killings has been noticeable, he says.

Randall’s group may be in a radical minority, but he is part of a much larger body of African American opinion which is pro-firearms and pro-second amendment. Not everyone in that category shares Randall’s broader political views, but many see guns as a way of being safe in a country that is dangerous for black citizens.
***
In 2014, Pew found that 19% of black Americans reported owning a gun, compared with 41% of white Americans. More recent surveys indicate a slight weakening in what overall is strong black support for greater gun control. But other data from late in 2014 suggests that more than half of black Americans still think that owning a gun makes someone safer.

If we accept the accuracy of these figures, there seems to be a large gap between the number of people who think guns would make them safer, and the number who actually go out and get a firearm.

Angered by her announcement last week that her office will step up its enforcement of the state's assault weapons ban, a bipartisan group of 58 lawmakers sent Attorney General Maura Healey a letter over the weekend opposing "in the strongest possible terms" her decision and the way she announced it.

Healey last week announced that she will crack down on enforcement of the state's 1998 assault weapons ban, specifically focusing on what she called "copycat" versions or duplicates of firearms banned under that law.

A gun qualifies as a forbidden copycat if it is "substantially similar in construction and configuration" to one of the banned guns or has interchangeable key parts, according to the enforcement notice.

"For the last 18 years, the law has been implemented and enforced consistently, both by your office and your predecessors," the legislators wrote. "Your new directive, which has been presented by your office as nothing more than a closing of 'loopholes' in the current law, appears in fact to be much more than that: the enforcement of a whole new law that unfairly infringes on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners in Massachusetts."

Clinton is a uniquely flawed candidate. She has been in the national eye for a very long time and people have largely made up their minds about her. It is very hard for her to change those perceptions. What that means is she has a hard and relatively low vote ceiling; no matter what she says or does (or what Trump says or does) there is a rock-hard group of people who will not vote for her.

In a binary choice election — which is what this is — Trump benefits from the fact that he is simply not Clinton. What's happened to date in the race — pre-GOP convention — is that support has peeled off Clinton but not gone to Trump. Rather, it's moved to "undecided." The GOP convention, as Philip Bump documented here, led to some movement to Trump. Hence the tightening in polls.

What this all means is that the race is close today and there's plenty of reason to believe it will stay like that all the way until the election. For those who say Trump can't win, you probably said he would have never made it this far. All assumptions need to go out the window in an election like this one. Trump seems to understand that.

A 20-year-old college student was found in the roadside bushes of a small northern Indian city last week, raped and left for dead. In the days afterward, a shocking possibility came to light: Her attackers may be the same five men who had raped her three years earlier but were out on bail. They allegedly raped her again because she had been so steadfast in her case against them.