Click here for things LaPierre didn’t blame for mass murder in America, and click here for the weirdly outdated and little-known things he did blame.

Igor Volsky: Only gun owners and gun lobbyists — who have spent years easing gun regulations across the country — were spared any responsibility.

Lawyers, Guns & Money: “What if…“when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security?” asked Wayne LaPierre earlier today. We don’t know, to be honest.  But we do know that on April 20, 1999, a “uniformed community resource officer”, in this case a trained Sheriff’s deputy, was armed and on duty at Columbine High School. An honest to goodness, qualified, “good guy with a gun”.”

Josh Marshall: “In LaPierre’s mind the main victim of all this appears to be the NRA. But I want to set that aside for a moment and focus on one part of LaPierre’s statement — where he seems to be endorsing what amounts to ‘Prepper-ism’. We wrote about it today — the movement that Nancy Lanza was apparently a part of, that believes in storing supplies and guns for some inevitable collapse of civilization when it will be every man for himself.

“LaPierre referenced this line at least a couple times: ‘The fact is this. That wouldn’t even begin to address the much larger, more lethal criminal class, killers, robbers, rapists, gang members, who have spread like cancer in every community across our nation. Meanwhile, while that happens, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40% to the lowest levels in a decade. So now due to a declined willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years. Add another hurricane, terrorist attack, or some other natural or man made disaster, and you have got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.’”

Charles Pierce: “You have to give Wayne credit. He didn’t cut the whiskey with water. We need more guns in schools. Gun laws don’t work, not even registration, but we should register all the mentally ill, because the mentally ill don’t have a few million dollars and a lobbyist like Wayne LaPierre dedicated to gutting the law that would register them. The media should stop lying and being ignorant and engaging in a massive cover-up of the existence of Kindergarten Killers. Congress should immediately empower retired cops and firemen and put armed guards in every American school, although Wayne doesn’t know fk-all how we’ll pay for it, but, boy, those guys are really brave. Guns don’t kill people. Deranged people kill people. “Bad guys” kill people. Grand Theft Auto kills people. American Psycho kills people. (Lock up Christian Bale, especially now that the Dark Knight cycle is over.) “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

“[...] And there you have it. For all the hopeful rhetoric expended over the past week about how this might actually be a “tipping point” for the NRA, the organization is as dead set against rational gun laws as it was a week ago Friday. It is not going to soften its stand on militarized civilian weaponry, or large-quantity magazines. There was no mention yesterday of background checks, or closing the gun-show loophole, or any of those other “sensible” regulations that so many people told me for a week that the “great majority” of NRA members actually would support. That may be true, but it’s also been rendered utterly irrelevant in the light of what the organization’s leadership said yesterday. They have their plan, and its about more guns, period. The rest is an exercise in the same distraction and misdirection that the NRA has used, time and time again, after every one of the mass shootings of the past two decades. Now the distraction and misdirection is a little more detailed, and they have a new pitchman selling it, but it is clear that the NRA has no intention of cooperating in any plan going forward from the Connecticut school shooting that has anything to do with registering or limiting America’s firearms…”

Op X: “People cite the 2^nd Amendment as their crutch, pleading a need to stay armed against a potentially tyrannical government (as if it was 1795, musket vs. musket). As much as your Bushmaster, .50 Caliber Desert Eagle and your Sig Sauer are well oiled, locked and loaded, somehow I don’t think they’d stand up to an A-10 Warthog, an F-15 Strike Eagle or an F/A-18 Super Hornet. They’d have a bit of trouble with an M1 Abrams Tank, or a nuclear submarine for that matter. Anticipating this argument, gun owners pirouette to the belief of a stronger likelihood of being wrongfully attacked by local authorities – police, sheriffs, etc. Police who they believe they could go toe-to-toe with in having similar armament. This sentiment coming from the same inquiring minds who cry “States Rights!”, yet it’s the local authorities who will be coming for them.

“Any way you slice it, the arguments for guns are simpleton, brow-beating bullshit projected onto us by people with inferiority complexes. We’re left trying to reason with small-minded bullies with low self-esteem who find strength in menacing others because they own a gun.”

Think Progress: “In March 1995, LaPierre sent a fundraising letter to 3.5 million NRA members calling federal law enforcement agents “jack-booted government thugs” and arguing that “in Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” President George H.W. Bush resigned his membership in protest and LaPierre was forced to apologize.”

Michael Bloomberg: “Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.”

  

  

  

  

via ollebosse