The NRA’s Double Standard
Weekend Edition August 22-24, 2014
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The NRA’s Double Standard
by BRIAN J. FOLEY
After a crazed man shot and killed 20 students and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December, 2012, NRA Executive VP Wayne LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Nothing else. A good guy with a gun is the only thing. LaPierre’s response to the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard the following year (12 dead, 3 wounded) was the same: “There weren’t enough good guys with guns. When the good guys with guns got there it stopped.”
Almost a year to the day after the Newtown shooting, the NRA ballyhooed a school shooting that was, arguably, stopped by an armed guard:
The attacker’s rampage was stopped short by the quick response of an armed deputy sheriff who was working as a resource officer at the school. Upon learning of the threat, the deputy ran from the cafeteria to the library, yelling for people to get down and identifying himself as a deputy sheriff. The horrific incident lasted only a total of 80 seconds and ended with the shooter turning his gun on himself in the library as the deputy was closing in on him. ”We know for a fact that the shooter knew that the deputy was in the immediate area and, while the deputy was containing the shooter, the shooter took his own life,” Sheriff Robinson said. Robinson said the deputy’s response was “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself.
NRA Institute for Legislative Action, “Stopped in 80 Seconds: Armed Response, Not Gun Control, Halted School Rampage”
(December 20, 2013).
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/22/the-nras-double-standard/
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