Less than two hours after the moment of silence for the dead of Newtown, after the solemn sound of church bells ringing for the children and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary on the last school morning before Christmas, there was Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, calling for more guns in America, not fewer.
So LaPierre wasn’t just the biggest gun guy in the whole country on Friday, he was the dumbest, and most delusional, and most dangerous.
“Some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain,” LaPierre said, but that is exactly what he did in a phony, tone-deaf, self-serving speech that was the opposite of what we saw and heard from President Obama last Sunday night in Newtown.
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Here was LaPierre — whose organization and lobbyists have aggressively targeted any politician in this country who tries to take away a single gun — using this moment to blame the media and video games and the movies for what happened in Newtown, everything except the kind of assault rifle that should be illegal for any civilian anywhere.
On a morning when protesters were carried out of a ballroom in Washington, D.C., where LaPierre spoke screaming about the NRA and blood and guns, you kept waiting for LaPierre to be carried out, shrieking that the bad guys are coming for him and for all us. Somehow he thought it was completely proper one week after Newtown to make the NRA some kind of victim of Sandy Hook Elementary.
At a time when the NRA and its leadership had a chance to join with the President and Congress to look for meaningful solutions in a country where schools and shopping malls and colleges and Army bases and churches are turned into shooting ranges, LaPierre basically talks about forming his own private militia — better than porn for a big gun guy like him — and sounds like someone who is not only out of touch with his own country, but his own membership.
He does not want a single new gun law, does not talk about taking a single gun off the street, or making it more difficult for just about anybody to get a gun at a gun show in too many parts of this country. Instead he wants to lecture the room and the American people about what the definition of a machine gun is.
In LaPierre’s weird view of the world, the solution to everything is to make every elementary school and middle school and high school and college campus into some version of “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”
More people got shot up at Virginia Tech than they did at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown. So how many armed guards does it take to make safe the spread-out expanse of a normal college campus? LaPierre talks about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns and doesn’t just sound like he’s the bad guy with guns, he sounds like some crazy survivalist.
This wasn’t about protecting dead children on Friday, one week and a couple of hours after Newtown. It was about protecting his association. LaPierre was more worried about his members on Friday than the dead of Newtown.
And LaPierre didn’t take any questions, so nobody got to ask him this one: Did he really think that if it wasn’t legal for Nancy Lanza, the mother of the shooter, to own an assault rifle, that she would have owned one?
LaPierre’s solution is a “police officer in every single school and a protection plan for every single school.” More guns! He talks about the Secret Service guarding one President and makes it sound simple to establish a Secret Service for every school in America.
Of course the NRA will train the muscle and arm it and supply it, which makes you start to wonder just how much gun money and blood money they are making at the NRA, in this Tombstone, Ariz., vision of America in the 21st century that is more violent than any video game or movie that LaPierre talked about on this day.
“There is no national one-size-fits-all (solution) to protect our children,” LaPierre said, and he was right about that, like some dumb blindfolded squirrel actually finding an acorn.
Only he did not provide a solution in his big moment, he offered a doomsday version of America that does not just disqualify him from this conversation, it ought to get him fired, unless the responsible gun-lovers in the NRA want this guy continuing as their voice and face in a post-Newtown world.
With a chance to show some real grace, and perhaps offer real solutions, LaPierre of the NRA chose to once again attack anybody who opposes him, to act as if he were running for something on the week after Newtown. That didn’t just make him delusional on Friday. It made him a bum.
