He just can’t stop shooting off his mouth.
The clueless CEO of the National Rifle Association yesterday refused to back down from his widely panned proposal to put cops and armed guards in every school, without also considering any new gun-control laws.
“If it’s crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s top exec, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe,” he said.
LaPierre wants his 4 million-member organization, the nation’s largest gun-rights lobbying group, to coordinate an effort to put volunteer guards, primarily cops and ex-military members, in the schools.
On Friday, he broke the NRA’s week of silence after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., with the proposal of armed school guards.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said yesterday, repeating his now-infamous line from Friday.
But any form of restrictions on the purchase of weaponry — from military-style assault rifles to high-capacity ammo clips — is still out of the question, LaPierre said.
“It’s not going to work. It hasn’t worked. Dianne Feinstein had her ban, and Columbine occurred,” he said, referring to the Democratic California senator’s proposed assault-weapon ban, which is modeled after a federal restriction that had been in effect in 1999 when two teens murdered 13 at Columbine HS in Colorado — where an armed guard was assigned.
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“I’ll tell you what would work,’’ LaPierre said, launching into a tirade against the nation’s mental-health-care system.
“We have a mental-health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of these lunatics. We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that’s got these monsters walking the streets.”
Throughout the interview, LaPierre, whose 2010 salary was $835,000, repeatedly balked at the notion that the NRA would back any compromise on assault-weapons legislation.
Feinstein’s proposed assault-weapon ban “is a phony piece of legislation, and I don’t think it will pass for this reason: It’s all built on lies,” he said. “They say they’re military guns like our soldiers use. That’s not true.”
Actually, the .223-caliber Bushmaster AR-15 rifle that 20-year-old Adam Lanza used in the school massacre is nearly identical to the military-grade M4 and M16 — even the bullets can be interchanged.
The only difference is that the civilian version is not automatic and shoots only one bullet per pull of the trigger.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said of LaPierre’s comments, “We’re not against this idea of having police officers in the schools, but it’s not enough.
“If some guy comes in with an assault weapon, how is a police officer with a 9 millimeter going to survive?” he asked reporters at his Midtown office yesterday.
Meanwhile, the NRA’s Republican allies seemed to play both sides of the fence.
“We had an armed guard in Columbine, we had an assault ban, neither one of them worked,” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) said.
An AR-15 owner himself, Graham said laws can’t “stop mass murder by somebody that’s hellbent on doing crazy things.”
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) — a gun advocate with a conservative base— said he knows of no one in Congress who has yet to propose legislation similar to the NRA proposal, showing Republicans are not yet ready to jump on the NRA plan.
“As far as arming everybody in school and teachers, look, I had, you know, high-school science teachers who can’t negotiate a Bunsen burner. For goodness sake, I wouldn’t suggest that we necessarily give everybody a gun,” Chaffetz said on “Meet the Press.”
Additional reporting by Matt McNulty