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Defiant NRA leader rejects gun controls, asks to put
police in schools
A protesters holds a banner in front of
the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president Wayne LaPierre,
during a news conference addressing the aftermath of the school shooting at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
By
Michael O’Brien, NBC News
Dec.
21, 2012
National Rifle Association
CEO Wayne LaPierre defiantly blamed violent video games and movies, the media,
gun-free zones in schools and other factors during the organization’s first
public statement following the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn last week.
LaPierre, who was interrupted
by Code Pink protesters twice during a statement (during which he refused to
answer questions), said that the students in Newtown might have been better protected had
officials at Sandy Hook Elementary been armed. He said that putting a police
officer in every single school in America might make schools safer.
“The only thing that stops a
bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said, asking Congress to
immediately appropriate the money to put a police officer in every single
school in the country.
The NRA executive’s statement
was nothing short of defiant in the face of mounting discussion of the need for
tighter restrictions on guns — including renewing a ban on assault weapons — in
the wake of last week’s shooting.
Protesters twice interrupted
LaPierre, who will appear this Sunday exclusively on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”
holding signs reading “NRA KILLING OUR KIDS,” and screaming that the gun rights
group has “blood on its hands.”
^^^
The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey Hole
Published:
December 21, 2012
Wayne LaPierre, the executive
vice president of the National Rifle Association, would have been better
advised to remain wherever he had been hiding after the Newtown, Conn.,
massacre, rather than appear at a news conference on Friday.
No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something
“meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very
existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we
were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.
Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed
at times as he said the killing was the fault of the media, songwriters and
singers and the people who listen to them, movie and TV scriptwriters and the
people who watch their work, advocates of gun control, video game makers and
video game players.
The N.R.A., which devotes
itself to destroying compromise on guns, is blameless. So are unscrupulous and
unlicensed dealers who sell guns to criminals, and gun makers who bankroll Mr.
LaPierre so he can help them peddle ever-more-lethal, ever-more-efficient
products, and politicians who kill even modest controls over guns.
His solution to the proliferation of guns,
including semiautomatic rifles designed to kill people as quickly as possible,
is to put more guns in more places. Mr. LaPierre would put a police officer in
every school and compel teachers and principals to become armed guards.
He wants volunteer and
professional firefighters, who already risk their lives every day, to be
charged with thwarting an assault by a deranged murderer. The same applies to
paramedics, security guards, veterans, retired police officers. “The only thing
that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Mr. LaPierre said.
We cannot imagine trying to
turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an
armed mob. And let’s be clear, civilians bristling with guns to prevent the
“next Newtown”
are an armed mob even with training offered up by Mr. LaPierre. Any town
officials or school principals who take up the N.R.A. on that offer should be
fired.
Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree
“might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed
security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed
security guard — just as there would have been even more carnage if civilians
had started firing weapons in the Aurora
movie theater.
In the 62 mass-murder cases
over 30 years examined recently by the magazine Mother Jones, not one was
stopped by an armed civilian. We have known for many years that a sheriff’s
deputy was at Columbine
High School in 1999 and
fired at one of the two killers while 11 of their 13 victims were still alive.
He missed four times.
People like Mr. LaPierre want
us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold
precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance
about the facts. Police officers know that firing a weapon is a huge risk;
that’s why they avoid doing it. In August, New York City
police officers opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State
Building. They killed him
and wounded nine bystanders.
Mr. LaPierre said the news
media call the semiautomatic weapon used in Newtown a machine gun, claim that it’s a
military weapon and that it fires the most powerful ammunition available.
That’s not true. What is true is that there is a growing call in America for
stricter gun control.
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