Rapid-fire
NRA LEADER Wayne LaPierre will target anyone for blame over the Las Vegas massacre — except himself.
In a rare television interview on Sunday, the nation’s top gun lobby activist blamed “elites,” Hollywood, video games, federal law enforcement and former President Barack Obama for mass shootings like the Vegas rampage.
But he said nothing about the National Rifle Association’s role in mowing down new gun laws, and he wouldn’t commit to supporting any legislation after Vegas.
“There are menaces out there every day. People want to be able to protect themselves,” LaPierre told CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
“All the elites that have been speaking out this past week, they all want to protect themselves . . . The No. 1 person teaching irresponsible use of firearms is all these elites’ employer: the Hollywood, television, gaming industry.”
The self-professed enemy of the elites made more than $5.1 million in 2015, according to the NRA’s most recently available tax form. That’s a spike of more than $4 million from LaPierre’s compensation in 2014.
LaPierre also took aim at Obama and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives under his administration, alleging they “fuzzed the line” between automatic and semiautomatic weapons, opening the door for Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock to legally make his weapons more lethal.
But LaPierre ducked repeated questions about whether he would support a bill banning bump stocks, the cheap and legal devices Paddock used to turn some of his rifles into rapid-fire killing machines.
“It’s illegal to convert a semiautomatic to a fully automatic,” LaPierre said when asked where he would stand on that bill.
He never gave a straight answer about the bill, but said five separate times that it’s up to the ATF to “do its job” and crack down on illegal firearms.
LaPierre’s dodge on the bill question came just days after the NRA endorsed efforts to better regulate bump stocks — a rare instance of the gun lobby backing any form of firearm control.
The ATF under Obama decided it would not regulate bump stocks, since the agency did not consider the weapon modifiers to be firearms in their own right.
Even during the spate of mass shootings under Obama’s tenure, bump stocks received little attention until Paddock used them while murdering 58 people at a country music festival.
Despite the NRA’s earlier support for new bump stock rules, LaPierre gave no indication that the gun lobby will come out blazing for any additional gun laws.
LaPierre also slammed Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), an outspoken gun control advocate. He mentioned her nine times in his interview, accusing her of wanting a “utopian world without guns.”
But Feinstein, in fact, acknowledged the hard truths of Paddock’s massacre.
In her own “Face the Nation” interview Sunday, Feinstein said that no law could have been passed to stop Paddock — a man with no history of crime or mental health issues — from getting his hands on his arsenal.
Even so, she is still pushing for a new law to ban bump stocks. Feinstein said nearly 40 senators have supported the legislation so far — and none of them are Republicans. GOP senators have only shown “interest” so far, she said.