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N.R.A. Chief, Wayne LaPierre, Offers Ardent Defense of 2nd Amendment N.R.A. Chief, Wayne LaPierre, Offers Fierce Defense of 2nd Amendment
(about 3 hours later)
OXON HILL, Md. — The head of the National Rifle Association, speaking publicly on Thursday for the first time since last week’s deadly school shooting, defended gun ownership while criticizing the news media, Democrats and the F.B.I. OXON HILL, Md. — The head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, leveled a searing indictment on Thursday against liberal Democrats, the news media and political opportunists he said were joined together in a socialist plot to “eradicate all individual freedoms.”
Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. chief, delivered remarks to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that offered an ardent defense of his organization and the Second Amendment as a new movement led by young people makes emotional pleas for gun control. Mr. LaPierre’s remarks, his first since a gunman took the lives of 17 people at a Florida high school last week, seemed aimed at blunting the rising public pressure for stricter gun control. Conservatives, he said, needed to push back even as liberals tried to smear them.
Mr. LaPierre said every member of his association mourned the loss of the 17 people who died in the shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school. “The shameful politicization of tragedy — it’s a classic strategy, right out of the playbook of a poisonous movement,” he said to a friendly but largely restrained crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “They hate the N.R.A. They hate the Second Amendment. They hate individual freedom.”
“We share a goal of safe schools,” Mr. LaPierre said. He argued for enforcing existing gun laws and not rushing to enact new ones. Mr. LaPierre said Democrats wanted to eliminate the Second Amendment with more restrictions. The solution Mr. LaPierre offered was not to pass new laws but to better enforce the existing background check system and, he said, “harden our schools” with more armed guards.
“What they want are more restrictions on the law-abiding,” Mr. LaPierre said. “Think about that, their solution is to make you, all of you, less free.” He said the solution to the problem of school shootings was to “harden schools” by adding more armed security officers. “Evil walks among us,” he added, making a passing reference to “another terrible tragedy” in the Parkland, Fla., school massacre.
It was not a new argument for the N.R.A. in the wake of a mass shooting that has reignited the debate on gun control. But this latest push comes as a pro-gun rights Republican who campaigned with the support of the powerful lobbying group is in the White House. Mr. LaPierre’s pugnacious appearance appeared to signal a tactical shift for the N.R.A., which had officially remained mostly quiet in the week after the Florida shooting, even as a movement of young people, including survivors of the massacre, made emotional pleas for gun control. The organization typically uses the first few days after an episode of mass gun violence to lie low before it comes out hard in opposition to any new gun control measures.
In a series of Twitter posts before Mr. LaPierre’s remarks, President Trump advocated arming teachers who have received special training, which the N.R.A. supports. But the president also proposed other measures, such as raising the minimum age to 21 for the purchase of assault rifles, a plan the N.R.A. has already come out against. “The N.R.A. will not only speak out,” he said, “we will speak out louder and we will speak out stronger than ever before.”
Mr. LaPierre also criticized the “unbelievable failure of the F.B.I.” The bureau, by its own admission, did not follow protocol in pursuing a tip about the Parkland gunman. Mr. LaPierre, who for around three decades has been the N.R.A.’s public face of unwavering resistance to tighter restrictions on guns, used his speech to play to the fear and mistrust that many on the right have toward government.
He raised the specter of mass gun confiscation. He accused federal agencies like the Justice Department of weaponizing their power to punish political enemies. He warned darkly that “our country will be changed forever” at the hands of socialist conspirators.
“History proves it. Every time in every nation in which this political disease rises to power, its citizens are repressed, their freedoms are destroyed and their firearms are banned and confiscated,” he said, reading slowly and deliberately from his prepared text.
Mr. LaPierre’s appearance each year at the conference, known as CPAC, is typically an event that passes without much notice. But this year, coming just a week after one of the worst school shootings in American history, CPAC seemed to take on the feel of an N.R.A. forum.
Mr. LaPierre’s name was initially left off the program. Then, on Thursday morning, the conference’s organizers released a revised schedule with both Mr. LaPierre and Dana Loesch, an N.R.A. spokeswoman, added as speakers.
Outside the hall where they spoke, an N.R.A. booth was broadcasting hours of online video programming from its in-house news channel, NRATV, which the organization has used as an early-warning system to alert its followers to gun control efforts.
Ms. Loesch, who just hours earlier had appeared subdued as she spoke softly in defense of the N.R.A. at a contentious forum in Florida hosted by CNN, reverted to the caustic, insult-lobbing persona she has cultivated on NRATV, where she is also a host.
Speaking before Mr. LaPierre, she called for more guns in schools, denounced the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as political persecutors and accused liberals of trying to sabotage the existing background check system for gun purchases.
Ms. Loesch also blamed James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director fired by President Trump amid a dispute over the bureau’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians, for indirectly causing the Parkland massacre.
“Maybe if you politicized your agency less and did your job more, we wouldn’t have these problems,” she sneered.
But the temperature on stage was noticeably hotter than in the audience, which gave Mr. LaPierre and Ms. Loesch polite but mostly unenthusiastic applause.
Mr. LaPierre evidently noticed, prompting him to comment on the stillness in the hall, which he wrote off as fear over the government oppression he warned was coming. “I hear a lot of quiet in this room,” he said. “I sense your anxiety. And you should be anxious. You should be frightened.”
He repeatedly returned to his attacks against gun control advocates as socialists lying in wait.
“And oh how socialists love to make lists,” he said, “especially lists that can be used to deny citizens their basic freedoms.”