“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”
That was NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s first response to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Connecticut, where 20 six and seven-year old children were massacred along with six school teachers and officials.
Since 1991 LaPierre has been the face of the National Rifle Association, and has watched the increase in guns, and gun violence, injuries, and death, grow across America. Experts call it an “epidemic.”
On Friday, he resigned as CEO and executive vice President after more than three decades at the helm of the gun lobby, just days before he goes on trial for corruption in a civil case brought in 2020 by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“LaPierre and three other current and former NRA leaders are facing a lawsuit that alleges they violated nonprofit laws and misused NRA funds to finance their lavish lifestyles,” NBC News reports.
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“I’ve been a card-carrying member of this organization for most of my adult life, and I will never stop supporting the NRA and its fight to defend Second Amendment freedom. My passion for our cause burns as deeply as ever,” LaPierre said on the social media site X, atop a Fox News report announcing his departure. His resignation is official at the end of the month.
In his speech (images above) one week after the Sandy Hook massacre, LaPierre called for “armed police officers in every single school in this nation,” while blaming gun-free zones, music videos, and movies for gun violence and death.
In 2014 PBS’s “Frontline” aired a documentary, “Inside the NRA’s Response to Newtown.” Watch a short clip from that program below or at this link.