WASHINGTON — The chief of the nation’s powerful gun lobby yesterday broke his weeklong silence since the Newtown school massacre in a bizarre rant that called for armed guards in every school and suggested that more guns in citizens’ hands is the solution to mass murder.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” a defiant National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre declared in a 30-minute press conference where he declined to take questions from the press.
“With all the money in the federal budget, can’t we afford to put a police officer in every single school?” LaPierre said, as he pinned the blame for the school shooting on “blood-soaked” films and video games.
It was the NRA’s first response to last week’s Connecticut bloodbath that prompted President Obama to call for sweeping new gun-control laws.
Among LaPierre’s potshots:
* “Politicians pass laws for gun-free zones,” he said. “And, in doing so, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”
* “While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully silent.”
* “Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize gun owners.”
* “And here’s another dirty little truth the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people, through vicious, violent video games.”
* “The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. Does anyone really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning an attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”
* “There are millions” of retired and active firefighters, cops, security professionals and military personnel who could serve in schools. “We could deploy them to protect our kids now.”
As he made his strange pitch yesterday in a heavily guarded hotel hall in Washington, DC, another gunman struck, this time in rural Pennsylvania, fatally shooting three people before dying himself in a gunfight that left three state troopers wounded.
LaPierre was interrupted by two demonstrators who managed to slip past NRA security to get into the hall.
They shouted at LaPierre and waved a sign that read “NRA killing our kids” in front of his podium as a national TV audience watched live.
The protesters, Tighe Barry and Medea Benjamin, of the anti-weapons group CodePink, managed to stop LaPierre twice in mid-sentence.
Gun-control advocates said LaPierre’s rant showed the degree to which his lobby is out of step with the rest of the nation.
“Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who accused the NRA of offering “a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.”
Rep. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), whose district includes Newtown, tweeted: “Walking out of another funeral and was handed the NRA transcript. The most revolting, tone-deaf statement I’ve ever seen.”
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said, “I thought they were going to make meaningful recommendations on gun control.”
In Newtown, resident Sheila Fisher, 58, said: “It’s ridiculous to feel that arming people and putting them in schools is going to cause any change. It’s going to cause more mayhem.”
Veronique Pozner, mother of slain 6-year-old Noah Pozner, said on “Anderson Cooper 360”:
“If I asked everybody in this world who has ever loved someone . . . to raise their hand, I don’t think there would be many hands down in this world.
“And every one of those hands is a reason why those weapons should not be out in the general public.”
Republican reaction to putting cops in schools was mixed.
“You can’t make [school] an armed camp for kids,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said.
Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) said, “It’s fixing the wrong problem.”
Additional reporting by Natalie O’Neill and Rebecca Harshbarger in New York and Erin Calabrese and Kate Kowsh in Newtown