NRA VP Statement: More Guns and Police in Schools
Earlier this year National Rifle Association Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre accused Barack Obama of giving “first term lip service to gun owners” to “deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment.” This wasn’t unusual talk from LaPierre, the public face of America’s most powerful interest group. Even so, LaPierre’s letter, issued a week after the Newtown shooting, was remarkably combative, often addressing the NRA’s critics directly. LaPierre’s two central solutions are to lessen access to violent video games and movies, and install police officers in schools (as he recommended after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting) for protection. Here are some key tidbits:
- “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
- “With all the foreign aid the United State does…can’t we afford to put a police officer in every single school?”
- “What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security? Will you at least admit it’s possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?
- “Why is the idea of a gun good when it’s used to protect our President or our country or our police, but bad when it’s used to protect our children in their schools?”
- “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people…And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?”
