The carnage at the Navy Yard by gunman Aaron Alexis who shot to death 12 people has one lesson, according to NRA leader Wayne LaPierre: there “weren’t enough good guys with guns.”
National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre argued on NBC’s Meet the Press that “there weren’t enough good guys with guns” to confront the shooter responsible for last week’s Washington Navy Yard rampage and he insisted that “when the good guys with guns got there, it stopped.”
In his first television interview since the mass shooting last Monday in which gunman Aaron Alexis killed 12 people, LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA, described the Navy Yard as a military facility that was “largely left unprotected.”
LaPierre said more personnel who work at military facilities, including retired military personnel, should be armed so they are able to stop attacks such as the one at the Navy Yard.
The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre visits Meet the Press to reflect on the tragedy at the Navy Yard.
“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.
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LaPierre also vehemently criticized the flaws in the nation’s treatment of the mentally ill, especially of those mentally ill people who try to buy guns. “They need to be committed is what they need to be, and if they’re committed, they’re not at the Navy Yard,” he said.
“I’ve been into this whole (background) check business for 20-some years; I’ve said the system is broken for 20 years and nobody listens,” he said. “It’s broken in terms of our military bases…. On the gun check, the NRA supported the gun check because we thought the mental records would be in the (national instant check) system, we thought criminals would be in the system. And we thought they would be prosecuted.”
He said that the records of those adjudicated to be dangerous are not entered into the national instant check system for gun buyers. “So the Aurora shooter in Colorado gets checked and is cleared, the Tucson shooter gets checked and gets cleared, Aaron Alexis go through the federal and state check and gets cleared,” LaPierre said because the nation’s mental health system doesn’t detect a dangerous person such as Alexis.
ABC News notes this is the same argument he gave after Adam Lanza massacred 26 kids and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in December.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.