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NRA chief bashes ‘unprotected’ Navy Yard

WASHINGTON – National Rifle Association boss Wayne LaPierre yesterday blamed the shooting massacre last week at the Washington Navy Yard on the military installation being “largely left unprotected.”

“The whole country … knows the problem was there weren’t enough good guys with guns. When the good guys with guns got there, it stopped,” LaPierre said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We need to look at letting the men and women that know firearms and are trained in them, do what they do best, which is protect and survive,” he said.

LaPierre pushed back at President Obama’s renewed call for tougher firearm laws in the wake of the shooting rampage by crazed former sailor Aaron Alexis that killed 12 people at the Navy Yard.

Obama made gun control a top priority after the horrific shooting that killed 20 children in Newtown, Conn, but proposals to expand background checks and ban military-style rifles died in Congress.

“We fought a good fight earlier this year, but we came up short, and that means we’ve got to get back up and go back at it,” Obama said awards dinner Saturday for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

LaPierre blamed the violence on the failure of courts to prosecute gun crimes and the failure to include mental health records in current background checks, letting Alexis and other lunatic shooters slip through the cracks.

“The Aurora shooter in Colorado gets checked, and is cleared. The Tucson shooter gets checked and gets cleared. Aaron Alexis goes through the federal and state check and gets cleared,” he said.

LaPierre argued that disturbed people like Alexis should be “committed” in a psychiatric institution.

“If they’re committed they’re not at the Naval Yard,” he said.