U.S. Senator-elect Chris Murphy, a Congressman whose district includes Newtown, called Friday's announcement from the National Rifle Association "the most revolting, tone-deaf statement I've ever heard."
"While Newtown continues the horrifying work of burying 20 children and six adults, the NRA has the gall to say that the solution to this problem is more, not fewer guns," he said.
"The NRA has now made itself completely irrelevant to the national conversation about preventing gun violence, by saying that the answer to the tragedy in Newtown is to put more deadly semi-automatic assault weapons on the streets and into our schools."
The NRA statement Friday -- after a weeklong silence following the horrific shooting of 26 people last week in Sandy Hook -- called for a surge of gun-carrying "good guys" around American schools.
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called for a new kind of American domestic security revolving around armed civilians, arguing that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
After the Columbine School massacre, President Bill Clinton proposed virtually the same thing. Does Chris Murphy think Clinton is tone-deaf and revolting? By the way, Columbine happened 5yrs after a nationwide ban on both assault weapons and magazines with a capacity over 10 bullets. The killers where planning to use bombs to blow up the school, but when the bombs didn't work properly, they switched to guns. The 2 guns that did the most damage were 2 sawed off shotguns, neither of which was a semiautomatic. One was a 5 shot capacity pump, and the other a 2 shot capacity break open. The weapon that was fired the most was a plinking style rifle (not an assault weapon by any definition) with a 10 bullet capacity. That one was fired almost 100 times. People are now saying we don't know if assault weapon bans or magazine bans would work or not, so we should at least try them and do something. Well, we DO know they don't work. Columbine is horrible proof of that. The federal ban was in place for 10yrs. Before it expired, the federal government did exhaustive research into it's effectiveness. They looked at over 50 independent studies, and determined neither ban had any effect at all on reducing crime. If we want to try something, how about we try President Clinton's (and the NRA's) of increasing armed guards for our children. We use them to protect our money. We use them to protect our airplanes. Are our children less important then money?
In their utopian vision of the world when only the government has guns, somehow all the will to do harm will be removed from evil people's hearts. I've yet to see a proposal on how that is accomplished. The NRA proposal was something new, out of the mainstream view and frankly one that could be fairly quickly implemented. The old adage of action beats reaction has never been so true. If there were ANY resistance against the killer in Newtown other than passive or throwing your unarmed self at him (brave, yet ultimately futile) the results WOULD have been different. Even if someone could pin him down until the PD arrived would have been better than having him wander around unchallenged to do his evil. Why NOT try something like that? Are banks and other businesses MORE important than schools? I say they aren't. I say banks are WAY less important than kids in our schools.