Ted Nugent criticizes teen activists
NRA board member says they ‘parrot lies’
The discourse surrounding the students who survived a mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school in February and their activism on gun policy has turned radioactive in recent weeks. On social media, gun-control critics have pilloried student leaders Emma González and David Hogg, posting doctored images of González shredding the Constitution and memes showing Hogg in a Nazi uniform.
The teen-led movement has reignited the nation’s gun debate, drawing stark partisan lines, as well as cries of manipulation from the right, who say Democrats have used the students as both shield and sword to advance tighter restrictions on firearms.
Enter musician Ted Nugent, perhaps the National Rifle Association’s most outspoken board member. In a Friday interview mostly focused on Gonzalez’s and Hogg’s criticism of the NRA, Nugent and radio host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo discussed how the students at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have navigated media appearances and their belief that the teenagers have been manipulated by left-wing ideologues.
“These poor children, I’m afraid to say, but the evidence is irrefutable. They have no soul,” Nugent told Pagliarulo on the radio show on WAOI in San Antonio, Texas, which is syndicated nationwide.
On Feb. 14 a gunman killed 17 students and educators at the Florida high school in one of the nation’s deadliest school massacres. Nikolas Cruz, 19, has been charged in the shooting.
Nugent’s spokeswoman and the NRA did not return requests for comment.
The radio talk mostly focused on González’s and Hogg’s interviews with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota five days after the shooting. “If they accept this blood money, they are against the children,” González said, speaking about politicians who accept donations from the NRA. “You’re either funding the killers, or you’re standing with the children.”
Nugent noted that no known NRA members have been involved in mass shootings, and he decried Camerota for not challenging González’s specious link to mass shootings and the NRA.
“The lies from these poor, mushybrained children who have been fed lies and parrot lies,” Nugent said. “I really feel sorry for them. It’s not only ignorant, dangerous and stupid — it’s soulless. To attack the good, law-abiding families of America when well-known, predictable murderers commit these horrors is deep in the category of soulless.”
Defending the NRA, Nugent noted that the gun-rights group has provided firearms safety training and that it is sustained not by gun manufacturers but by “families, good families” in the organization.