Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Staff members sit behind a chart of guns during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on January 30, 2013 in Washington, DC.

The National Rifle Association today released a plan calling for more armed personnel in schools — and pitching itself as a school safety trainer.

The gun-rights lobby, which claims five million members, is spending $1 million on what it calls the National School Shield, accordingt to former Arkansas Rep. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican paid consultant to the NRA and director of its schools project.

In the days after a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre said schools should increase security measures, including arming teachers and hiring more school officers, while opposing federal legislation such as expanded background checks for gun-buyers and limits on certain weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines.

At today’s press conference in Washington, Hutchinson reiterated that sentiment.

Among the eight recommendations in a 225-page report Hutchinson delivered to the NRA: The group should serve as the nation’s premier advocate and trainer for school safety while the federal government should focus on doling out money to school districts that need it to improve safety.

“The NRA has the nationally recognized expertise to develop and implement the stringent training courses” recommended by Hutchinson’s team, the report says. Grants to help pay for new school officers and security measures such as  heavier doors and metal detectors could be administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the report suggests. It doesn’t recommend a specific dollar amount.

The NRA released a statement after the press conference saying its officials “need time to digest the full report” yet is confident that Hutchinson and his team’s recommendations “will go a long way to making America’s schools safer.”

Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, called the NRA plan “radical.”

She called on Congress to “reject any proposal that militarizes our schools.”

Original post is NRA Training Your School Guards? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

President Barack Obama wipes tears as he speaks about the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Dec. 14, 2012, in the press briefing room of the White House. Photo by Charles Dharapak / AP

Consider the possibility that these two things are true:

– Nine in 10 Americans support the idea of more stringent background checks for gun buyers. The polls say so, and a share such as nine in 10 is so far beyond margins of error in polling that opinion on this appears clear.

– Better background checks won’t prevent people from picking up weapons of mass destruction and slaughtering 20 children in five minutes, as was done in Newtown, Connecticut.

“Criminals aren’t going to be checked,” the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre argued on “Meet the Press” last weekend. And Adam Lanza, who carried a military-styled assault rifle, other weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, wasn’t a known criminal until he had killed his mother, 20 first-graders, six educators and himself.

Authorities in affidavits filed in Connecticut this week reported that Lanza, 20, fired 154 rounds from his Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle, and 10 magazines each capable of holding 30 bullets were found at the scene, many partly or fully emptied. At his home, where he had shot his sleeping mother in the head with the rifle, police found a holiday card from her with a check for him apparently for a semi-automatic pistol.

Yet almost four months since the shootings, polls show waning public support for tougher gun restrictions, and Congress shows less resolve for action with each passing week.

“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” President Barack Obama said at the White House yesterday.

What’s happened in the three and a half months since Newtown is that the debate over gun control in Washington has been condensed to the possibility of approving those background checks that most people still support and which the NRA warns will do no good.

So nothing will be done about assault weapons, or 30-bullet magazines, under this scenario, which of course is the NRA’s goal in representing not only the rights of gun-owners but also the business aims of gun manufacturers.  And by constricting the debate to what is potentially a feckless response to the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, the gun lobby will chalk up another hard-fought victory.

It could also be true that real advocates of gun control should listen to the NRA on this one: Background checks for gun-buyers won’t stop another couple dozen children from dying in five minutes.

Removing weapons of mass destruction from the streets of America might.

Original post is Sandy Hook’s Legacy: Status Quo by Political Capital.

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 15, 2013.

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, drew enthusiastic applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference today when he took the stage after playing news clips of political pundits calling him “crazy.”

The longtime gun-rights lobbyist reiterated NRA stances to a friendly crowd, saying that “the real goal” of universal background check legislation moving through Congress is to develop a registry of gun owners that the government can make public and use to impose taxes.

LaPierre also said the NRA’s push for armed officers in all schools is being denounced by “powerful elites who will always have their own private security.”

“In their distorted view of the world , they’re smarter than we are,” he said. “They’re special. If we dare disagree, they’ll scorn us, they’ll demonize us and they’ll try to shut us up.”

He added: “We will not be silenced,” a line that moved audience members to their feet.

Original post is NRA’s LaPierre: ‘Will Not Be Silenced’ by Political Capital.

There is no higher-priced ad than a Super Bowl commercial.

And there is no higher-stakes fight than the one that the nation’s mayors are waging against the National Rifle Association.

In the truest tradition of opposition research, the mayors’ “Demand A Plan” campaign has fielded a third-quarter ad in Super Bowl XLVII that places the words of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre deep in his own end zone.

In a May 1999 congressional hearing, LaPierre listed the gun measures that his organization found “reasonable.”

“We think it ‘s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone,” LaPierre told Congress in 1999, and that testimony is replayed in the ad aired by Mayors Against Illegal Guns – though, now, the NRA is calling more pervasive background checks no solution to  gun violence.

Background checks for all gun-buyers, including those at gun shows as well as those at retail stores, is the one measure that draws almost universal support in opinion polling. The mayors’ ad would appear to be a high-priced calculation that, for whatever happens with assault weapons or mega-ammunition clips in the Capitol Hill gun-control debate, there is one measure that the NRA, representing gun owners and manufacturers, cannot stop.

The ad is built around children,  in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting that claimed the lives of 20 first-graders. “America can do this for us,” says one child in the ad, picturing children at play. “Please.”

Original post is Mayors’ Super Bowl Gun-Control Ad: Hail Mary Against the NRA’s Defense by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

A Fairfax County police officer at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Virginia.

Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association spokesman who proposes arming the guards of the nation’s schools in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, will call on Congress tomorrow to lay a “blanket of security” with a School Shield Program.

“We joined the nation in sorrow over the tragedy that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut,” LaPierre plans to say, according to a copy of his testimony released by the NRA today. “There is nothing more precious than our children. We have no more sacred duty than to protect our children and keep them safe. ”

The executive vice president of the organization representing gun owners and manufacturers plans a more measured appeal than the initial remarks he made in Washington a week after the massacre of 20 first-grade schoolchildren and six educators in Connecticut. There is less railing against the media in his prepared remarks, more pointed defense of a few notions: Background checks for gun-owners are not a universal solution, because criminals don’t get those checks, and semi-automatic weapons like the Bushmaster carried into Sandy Oak Elementary School have been around for 100 years. It’s not the guns, he maintains, it’s the people carrying them who are a threat.

“It’s time to throw an immediate blanket of security around our children,” he plans to say at a congressional hearing on what the nation should do about gun violence tomorrow. “About a third of our schools have armed security already – because it works. And that number is growing. Right now, state officials, local authorities and school districts in all 50 states are considering their own plans to protect children in their schools.”

“In addition,” he will say, “we need to enforce the thousands of gun laws that are currently on the books. Prosecuting criminals who misuse firearms works. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a dramatic collapse in federal gun prosecutions in recent years. Overall in 2011, federal weapons prosecutions per capita were down 35 percent from their peak in the previous administration. That means violent felons, gang members and the mentally ill who possess firearms are not being prosecuted. And that’s unacceptable.”

“I think we can also agree that our mental health system is broken. We need to look at the full range of mental health issues, from early detection and treatment, to civil commitment laws, to privacy laws that needlessly prevent mental health records from being included in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.”

“We need to be honest about what works and what does not work,” he will say. “Proposals that would only serve to burden the law-abiding have failed in the past and will fail in the future. Semi-automatic firearms have been around for over 100 years.  They are among the most popular guns made for hunting, target shooting and self-defense. Despite this fact, Congress banned the manufacture and sale of hundreds of semi-automatic firearms and magazines from 1994 to 2004. Independent studies, including a study from the Clinton Justice Department, proved that ban had no impact on lowering crime.”

“And when it comes to the issue of background checks, let’s be honest – background checks will never be “universal” – because criminals will never submit to them.

“But there are things that can be done and we ask you to join with us,” LaPierre will say– “the immediate protection for all, not just some, of our school children, swift, certain prosecution of criminals with guns and fixing our broken mental health system.

“We love our families and our country.  We believe in our freedom,” the NRA leader will say. “We’re the millions of Americans from all walks of life who take responsibility for our own safety and protection as a God-given, fundamental right. ”

Original post is NRA: Schools Need ‘Security Blanket’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Barrett Stinson/The Grand Island Independent/AP Photo

One of two police officers carrying an AR-15 assault rifle stands guard at the west entrance of Grand Island Senior High School, in Grand Island, Neb.

Updated at 12:10 pm EST

The White House scolded the National Rifle Association today for an ad calling the president an “elitist hypocrite” on gun control because his children have armed protection.

Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, called the ad “repugnant and cowardly.”

“Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight,” Carney said in a statement. “But to go so far as to make the safety of the president’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.”

On the day that President Barack Obama announced a sweeping agenda of 23 executive actions and more congressional proposals to curb gun violence, the NRA, which is proposing armed guards at the nation’s schools as an alternative, has released a video-ad calling the president an “elitist hypocrite” because his children are protected.

The narrator of the ad, appearing at the NRA Web-site and on the Sportsman Channel, does not identify the president’s two school-age daughters by name, but does ask this:

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools?”

Obama’s children attend the private Sidwell Friends school in Washington, yet it is not the school that provides their primary protection. The family of the president is protected by the Secret Service. The girls have been spotted in such venues as trick or treating in Washington escorted by tall men with radios in their ears.

The ad, which closes with images of the assault weapons that the president proposed banning today at an announcement of his agenda at a White House annex, contends that Obama demands that the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, yet “he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.”

In the aftermath of the shootings of 20 children and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre proposed armed guarding of all the nation’s schools. The only way to “stop bad guys with guns,” he said, is “good guys with guns.”

The NRA has suffered a certain loss of public approval in national opinion polls during the past month, while support for an assault weapons ban has increased in those surveys. The shooter in Newtown used a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle with oversized ammo clips to riddle with bullets the first graders slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As Obama and Vice President Joe Biden launch a campaign for gun control today, the gun lobby is mounting its own media assault: Sportsman Channel and the NRA “are bringing the NRA’s popular talk-radio show NRANEWS Cam & Co. to television every weekday live from 5-6pm ET beginning Jan. 15,” the organization announced. “Hosted by Cam Edwards, and airing live from the NRANEWS Studios in Washington, D.C., NRANEWS Cam & Co. will be the one and only news-talk series on television that can authoritatively address the issues that are vital to America’s more than 80 million sportsmen and sportswomen. ”

Like the assault weapons ban.

The weapons pictured in the NRA ad about the president’s children, closing with: `Protection for their kids, and gun-free zones for ours.”

Robert Gibbs, a former press secretary for Obama, called the NRA ad “disgusting” today in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” It is the sort of ad, he said, that political activists make in the middle of the night after some excessive drinking. Usually, he said, people arrive in the morning with a more sober eye and censor it.

Roger Runningen and Margaret Talev contributed. 

Original post is White House Scolds NRA for Ad Challenging Obama Over Children by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ida Mae Astute/ABC via Getty Images

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured two years ago when a gunman opened fired in Tucson, Arizona, and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly talk to Diane Sawyer about the need for changes in gun control laws and greater awareness of mental health issues on Jan. 5, 2013 in New York City.

Two years after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings that critically injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, she and her husband are adding their voices to a movement for gun control.

Big-city mayors are marking the anniversary with a TV ad tailored for the Washington market and communities that have suffered mass shootings featuring the mother of a 9-year-old girl killed in the Tucson shootings.

“Enough,” Giffords says in an interview on  ABC”s “World News with Diane Sawyer” airing tonight.

“After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [a movie theater massacre in] Aurora,” Colorado, her husband Mark Kelly, the astronaut, says in an interview also following the Dec. 14 killings of 20 young schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut. “I’m hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders’ being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody.”

Gifffords and Kelly visited Newtown to meet with families of the victims.

The “first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture,” Kelly says in the interview, excerpts released by ABC. “It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago.”

Giffords and Kelly are proposing “common sense” changes through “Americans for Responsible Solutions.”  They propose a comprehensive background check for the private sale of firearms and controls on large magazines of ammunition.

Jared Loughner, the accused shooter in Tucson, used a magazine with 33 rounds. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter who also  killed his mother and himself, used numerous 30-round magazines in a Bushmaster AR-15.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns today released a new TV ad featuring Roxanna Green, mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old killed in Tucson. It opens with a scene from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. In the ad, Green demands that elected officials in Washington take immediate action to curb gun violence in America.

“I have one question for our political leaders,” Green says in the ad. “When will you find the courage to stand up to the gun lobby?  Whose child has to die next?”

The ad is airing on Washington, DC, cable through Jan. 14, the group says, and in markets where there have been mass shootings:  Tucson, Waco, Texas, Roanoke, Denver, Binghamton, N.Y., and Milwaukee.

“How many more children must die before Washington does something to end our gun violence problem?” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of the mayors’ group and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, says in a statement accompanying the ad’s release.

“Roxanna Green knows all too well the pain of losing a loved one gun violence – sadly, there are parents and siblings and friends who learn this every day in our country,” says co-chair Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston. “It’s time for Washington to act to reduce gun violence — for the 33 Americans that are killed every day and for all of our children.”

President Barack Obama has charged Vice President Joe Biden with assembling an agenda for legislative action following the Newtown shootings, asking for those goals by the end of this month.

The National Rifle Association has proposed stationing an armed guard at every school.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, urging Congress after the Newtown shootings  “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

“I bought a gun at Walmart recently and I went through a background check,” Kelly says in the ABC interview. “”Why can’t we just do that and make it more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to get guns?”

Giffords has undergone a long and arduous recovery aided by physical therapy, speech therapy and yoga. She has been able to ride a horse and is preparing for a tandem bicycle ride with her husband, a space shuttle pilot. She plans to apply the same resolve toward the mission of gun control, Kelly says. “Gabby works very hard in her rehab,” he says. “Now we intend to work very hard on this new project.”

Original post is Tucson Two Years Later, Newtown: `Whose Child Has to Die Next?’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Candice Towell/Getty Images

National Rifle Association (NRA) President Charlton Heston holds up a rifle during his address at the 131st NRA convention at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Nevada, in this April 27, 2002 file photo.

Wayne LaPierre was channeling Charlton Heston today.

LaPierre, the longtime executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, issued a defiant speech today in Washington with the NRA’s answer to the schoolhouse shootings that felled 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, a week ago: Arm the nation’s school guards.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre, urging Congress “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

The answer to gun violence, the NRA suggests, is more guns.

“On the same day families lay three more children to rest in Newtown, the National Rifle Association wrongly called for increasing the number of guns around vulnerable children,” said Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “The NRA says they want armed guards in our schools.”

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat who lost her husband in a mass shooting on the Long Island Railroad in 1993, said she was “saddened” by LaPierre’s speech: “The NRA’s leadership had an opportunity to help unite the nation behind efforts to reduce gun violence and avert massacres like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School but it instead showed a disconnect between it and the majority of the American people.”

It was 12 years ago, during another presidential campaign year, when then-NRA President Charlton Heston, the actor, warned that the organization was under attack. Al Gore “is going to smear you as the enemy,” Heston said at the NRA annual convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 20, 2000. “He will slander you as gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, bloodthirsty maniacs who stand in the way of a safer America. Will you remain silent? I will not remain silent.”

Today, LaPierre was sounding a similar call to arms. He spoke of Americans as a modern-day militia.

“Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel, something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms,” Heston said, recalling farmers who rose to fight at Concord. “When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty.”

Holding a shotgun in his right hand and then above his head, and naming Gore again, the old actor voiced an old refrain: “From my cold, dead hands.”

Jonathan Salant contributed to this report. 

Original post is NRA’s `Cold, Dead Hands:’ 2012 by Political Capital.

Photograph by by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A demonstrator from CodePink holds up a banner as National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre delivers remarks during a news conference at the Willard Hotel on Dec. 21, 2012 in Washington.

Updated with Code Pink protester interview at 1:35 PM EST

The National Rifle Association remained mum, its executive vice president said today, while others sought to politically exploit the shootings of 20 children and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, one week ago.

Today, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre spoke out at a downtown Washington hotel — and lashed out at the American media for overlooking the violent video-games that permeate society and mis-characterizing firearms and their use in the United States.

This is a nation that defends all it cares about — its banks, its courthouses, its sports arenas, the president and Congress — with armed guards, LaPierre said in a statement at which NRA President David Keene said no questions would be taken.

“The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of protection,” LaPierre said. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a  good guy with a gun.”

The NRA had said it would offer a proposal today to address gun violence in the U.S. LaPierre’s solution: “a cordon of protection” around the nation’s schools.

LaPierre was interrupted twice by protesters in the audience who rose with banners.

(See ABC News’ coverage.)

The first, a red banner reading “NRA Killing Our Kids,” was held close to the speaker, obscuring him from the audience and the television cameras covering the event at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel. The man holding it for Codepink.com was hauled out by a security agent , the protester yelling, “End the arming, end the violence, stop the killing.” The second, reading “NRA Blood on Your Hands,” was held by a woman hauled out yelling, “Ban assault weapons.”

Medea Benjamin, who was escorted out of the hotel,  addressed some 50 protesters outside. Benjamin, co-director of the Code Pink activist group, allowed that she had been “naïve” to think the Newtown shootings would prompt any change of course from the NRA.
“Going in there, it was just a feeling that there was fear all around,” said Benjamin. “I don’t want to live in a society of fear, and the more guns we have, the more fearful we have to be. I think this twisted logic of the NRA that more guns are somehow going to make us feel more protected and safer is something we have to stand up to.”

LaPierre ignored both protests, as he did questions called out.

“For all the noise and anger directed at us over the past week, no one, nobody, has addressed the most important, pressing and immediate question we face,” he said. “How do we protect our children right now, starting today, in a way that we know works? The only way we answer that question is to face the truth.”

Lawmakers have required gun-free zones around schools, he said. The effect, he argued, has been to advertise to “every insane killer” that schools are the place to inflict maximum damage. “We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards,” he said — the same goes for  airports, courthouses, stadiums, all protected. “We care about our president, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents.” Congress convenes protected by an armed security force.

What the schools need, he said, is “an army of good guys.”

Emma Fidel contributed to this report. 

Original post is `NRA Killing Our Kids’ Banner Raised at LaPierre’s Washington Address by Political Capital.