NRA responds to barrage of criticism

After a week of media silence following the school shooting in Florida, the National Rifle Association has gone on the offensive in its first public response to the massacre, pushing back against law enforcement officials, the media, gun-control advocates and calls for stricter gun laws made by the teenage survivors of the attack.

The gun rights group — a powerful force in American politics — used a series of statements, speeches and videos to try to blunt an emotionally charged wave of calls for new gun restrictions since a gunman armed with an AR-15 rifle killed 17 people at a South Florida high school. As the teens who escaped the bloodshed in Parkland have passionately campaigned for new laws, it appears the politics suffusing the fraught issue of gun control are shifting, with President Donald Trump and some conservative lawmakers expressing a newfound willingness to consider at least modest measures.

While the NRA initially held back from the fray, that changed Wednesday, as a spokeswoman debated survivors of the attack during a heated town hall and then, a day later, Wayne LaPierre, the group’s executive vice president, forcefully decried gun-control advocates and the media for its coverage of the shooting.

“They don’t care about our schoolchildren,” LaPierre said near the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest annual gathering of American conservatives. “They want to make all of us less free.”

LaPierre also restated his belief that more armed security would stop school shootings, echoing Trump, while calling on parents and local authorities to beef up security on campuses.

It also followed the release of an NRA releasing a video claiming that “the mainstream media love mass shootings.” This advertisement argued that members of the media benefit from covering mass shootings and use them “to juice their ratings and push their agenda.”