NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre.Ron Sachs/DPA/ZUMAPress
Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, on Sunday delivered this message to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg: Spend all the money you want; it won’t make a whit of difference.
A day after news broke that Bloomberg would spend $12 million on an ad blitz pressuring Congress to expand gun background checks , LaPierre lashed out on NBC’s “Meet the Press”:
He’s going to find out that this is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and he can’t spend enough to try to impose his will on the American public. They don’t want him in their restaurants, they don’t want him in their homes, they don’t want him telling them what food to eat. They sure don’t want him telling them what self-defense firearms to own. And he can’t buy America. He’s so reckless in terms of his comments on this whole gun issue.
LaPierre claimed that Bloomberg’s ramped-up involvement in the debate over gun control had prompted a backlash: “Millions of people,” many of them presumably NRA members, were mailing in $5, $10, and $20 checks “telling us to stand up to this guy that says that we can only have three bullets, which is what he said. Stand up to this guy that says ridiculous things like, ‘The NRA wants firearms with nukes on them.'” He went on, “I mean it’s insane the stuff he says.”
As he often does, LaPierre argued on “Meet the Press” that America’s gun violence problem resulted from poor enforcement of existing laws, not a lack of regulation. He said the NRA supported “better enforcement” of federal gun laws, and that the failure to enforce gun laws was the Obama administration’s fault: “I know they don’t want to do it, but they ought to do it. It’s their responsibility.” LaPierre declined to mention that, for decades, the NRA and other gun-rights advocates have done everything they can to gut the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the agency that enforces federal gun laws.
