After a week of media silence following the school shooting in Florida, the National Rifle Association went on the offensive in its first public response to the massacre, pushing back against law enforcement officials, the media, gun-control advocates and the teenage survivors of the massacre who have pleaded for stricter gun laws.
In a series of statements, speeches and videos, the gun rights group — a powerful force in American politics — sought to stem what has been an emotionally charged wave of calls for new gun restrictions since police say a teenager armed with an AR-15 rifle killed 17 people at his former high school. An NRA spokeswoman debated survivors of the attack during a heated town hall Wednesday night, and in a speech Thursday morning, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA chief executive, excoriated the media for its coverage of the shooting.
“They don’t care about our school children,” LaPierre said near the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest annual gathering of American conservatives. “They want to make all of us less free.”
The NRA also released an advertisement Thursday morning that said “the mainstream media love mass shootings” and claimed that members of the media benefit from covering mass shootings in an effort “to juice their ratings and push their agenda.”
La Pierre, whose confrontational speeches have become a CPAC tradition, was not on early versions of the conference’s schedule. But when he arrived to speak, he reiterated his pitch for armed guards at schools and free firearms training of teachers. Then he rattled off businesses and people — from jewelry stores to Hollywood actors — who pay for security, calling for Americans to “harden our schools” in the same way.
“We at the NRA are Americans who continue to mourn, and care, and work every day to contribute real solutions to this practical problem,” he said. “Do we really love our money and our celebrities more than we love our children?”
LaPierre was particularly awful towards the students of Parkland today in his CPAC speech, and it's the same rhetoric that has ensured that the overwhelming majority of Americans who want fewer military-grade firearms and more background checks never get anywhere with Congress. It's worked every time so far.
I'm not 100% sure it will work this time. But that largely depends on how Americans vote in November, and by then the Parkland school shooting will have long been erased from America's memory banks by the deadly mass shootings that will almost certainly happen in the next several weeks and months ahead.
We'll see.
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