GunsNRA leader tells gun owners Obama does not understand them
Reacting to President Obama proposals for tighter gun controls, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), told gun owners on Tuesday that President Obama does not understand them. He said the president wanted to institute a national registry of firearms so he can tax or confiscate their weapons.
Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), told gun owners on Tuesday that President Obama does not understand them. He said the president wanted to institute a national registry of firearms so he can tax or confiscate their weapons.
USA Todayreports that LaPierre, who spoke at the annual Weatherby Foundation International Hunting and Conservation Awards at a casino in Reno, did not mince words.
“He doesn’t understand you. He doesn’t agree with the freedoms all of you cherish,” LaPierre said. His dinner speech was aired on the NRA’s Web site and in part by MSNBC.
LaPierre gave what he said was a response to Obama’s inauguration speech in which the president said, “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.”
Using an argument similar to the one used by Barry Goldwater when he accepted the Republican Party nomination for president on 16 July 1964 (“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”), LaPierre said: “Obama wants to turn the idea of absolutism into a dirty word, just another word for extremism…. It’s a way of redefining words so that common sense is turned upside down,” he added.
LaPierre also brushed off the idea that imposing limits on high-capacity magazines of ammunition, “or bans on hundred-year-old firearm technology….will somehow make us safer.”
LaPierre also said that Obama “wants you to believe that putting the federal government right in the middle of every firearms transaction will somehow make us all safer.”
“He wants to put every private, personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry,” LaPierre said. He added that there could be only two reasons for such a move: “To either tax them or take them.”
The NRA responded to the gun control proposals by posting a Web video that labeled Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for allowing his daughters to be protected by armed guards while rejecting a proposal, supported by the NRA, which would place armed guards at all schools.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie called the ad “reprehensible.”
John Ryder, Republican National Committee member, agrees with Christie that Obama’s daughters should be off-limits.
“I think the use of the President’s children in any such ad is inappropriate,” Ryder told Post Politics in an e-mail. ”I use different language, but I’m not from [New Jersey].”
Earlier this week, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over gun laws, has invited LaPierre to his hearing to give his opinion on Obama’s legislation.
