Wayne La Pierre. Photo: Gage Skidmore-Flickr
It took NRA CEO Wayne La Pierre a week to respond to the Valentine’s Day School massacre which took the lives of 17 high school students and personnel, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida.
La Pierre’s message of madness is one we’ve heard before: we need more guns—not less—to stop gun violence.
If La Pierre were right, wouldn’t America have less gun violence already, since there are approximately 300 million guns floating around in America—a figure that is higher per capita than any nation in the world?
During an unhinged speech, devoid of reality, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, La Pierre’s main message in the aftermath of this latest episode of mass murder was to tell America that: "To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun." Reportedly, there was one “good guy” with a gun, Deputy Scot Peterson—and he failed to stop the “bad guy with the gun.”
Echoing President Trump, La Pierre position is: if we flood schools with more guns we will magically have safer schools. Apparently, like Trump, La Pierre thinks what we need is more shootouts—cowboy, O.K. Corral style—to stop school shooters. The weird reasoning here is: we need more gun violence, to eradicate gun violence.
Should we be surprised to hear insanely asinine logic like this from those who represent the manufacturing merchants of death in the gun-making, and military war-profiteering industries?
Fearmongering and warmongering—not peace—is how these folks make money. Unfortunately, for the NRA, and their political lackeys, La Pierre’s claim is undercut by the big business success of gun manufacturers in selling their killing machines to regular Americans.
According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2009, there were more than 300 million guns
