For­mer Ten­nessee Sen­a­tor Fred Thomp­son was the next high-​pro­file can­di­date to ad­dress the au­di­ence. He did so af­ter a video on his ac­com­plish­ments ti­tled “The Hunt for Red Novem­ber” aired. He won the crowd with: “I do re­mem­ber a re­la­tion­ship from way back, from the time that Charl­ton He­s­ton came to Ten­nessee in 1994, and I formed a friend­ship with that great Amer­i­can and watched him hob­ble across the state with me on a bad hip and go through pain to help me win my first elec­tion in the Unit­ed States Sen­ate.”
Then Sen. Thomp­son got to the ba­sis of his phi­los­o­phy by say­ing, “I nev­er sub­scribed to the no­tion that it made our coun­try safer by in­fring­ing on the Sec­ond Amend­ment rights of law-​abid­ing cit­i­zens. I think back to the ‘A’ rat­ing I got from this or­ga­ni­za­tion and the en­dorse­ments that I was proud to re­ceive. So it’s not just a mat­ter of promis­es made, as far as I’m con­cerned, it’s a mat­ter of com­mit­ments that have been kept.”
Lat­er he point­ed out, “My phi­los­o­phy does not de­pend on my ge­og­ra­phy.” And he told the as­sem­bly, “I nev­er sub­scribed to the no­tion that it made our coun­try safer by in­fring­ing on the Sec­ond Amend­ment.” In an­swer to a ques­tion on the in­di­vid­u­al rights in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Sec­ond Amend­ment, Thomp­son said, “…the Con­sti­tu­tion does mean what is says and is not re­strict­ed to pro­tec­tion of mili­tias.”