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Wayne LaPierre
Executive Vice President, National Rifle Association
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: What are the demographics of the NRA? And are you concerned at all about the demographics?
A: We look at that all the time. We do have more males than females; on the other hand, females are the largest-growing segment. It's largely women that are buying firearms for personal protection. We've done a lot of polling with women, and if you ask them how fearful they are of crime and criminals, women who have bought a gun and learned how to shoot a firearm are much less in terror of the criminal element than women who do not own a firearm.
The polling data is very positive with young people. Young people don't want to be told by the government that they can't go out and exercise a freedom. They want it to be their choice, not the government's, whether they own a gun or not. I think the demographics of the NRA are very solid. Hispanics are overwhelming pro-firearms ownership and one of the strongest polling groups in this country on the Second Amendment question.
Q: Are you aware of any federal appellate decision that has ever struck down a gun law on the basis of the Second Amendment?
A: The Emerson case, not too long ago. One of the major circuits in the United States came down solidly on the side of the Second Amendment being an individual right. Up until this became a little bit of a political debate within the last 30 years, it was unquestioned in U.S. history that the Second Amendment was an individual right. Look at the work of every one of our Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson – "No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms"; George Mason – "I ask, sir, what is the militia? It's the whole people. To disarm the people is the best…way to enslave them"; Sam Adams – "The Constitution shall never be construed…to prevent people…from keeping their…arms." Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who was probably one of the most noted Supreme Court justices in the 1800s; Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas McIntyre Cooley, one of the most respected; Al Gore's attorney, Laurence Tribe – say it's an individual right even. Fourty-four states have it written right into their state constitution it's an individual right; and if you look at the overwhelming number of legal articles in scholarly publications the last ten years, it is swinging away from this politically correct argument that came out about 30 years ago that some of the media latched onto, back to the Second Amendment being without doubt an individual right. It wouldn't have been in the Bill of Rights if it wasn't; that sure wasn't about the government, it was about individual citizens.
Q: What are some of the more well-known cases handled by the NRA's Civil Rights Defense Fund?
A: There have been a number of cases; I'll give you one we just won. They had a high-school student go in with an NRA shooting camp shirt on. We teach safety and responsibility and safe gun handling, and research shows kids that learn about firearms are less likely to get involved in accidents. The teacher told him to go home or take off the shirt. Our Civil Rights Defense Fund got involved in that case on the basis of a First Amendment right. The court upheld the youngster's right of free speech to wear that shirt to class. In fact, the court pointed out that, according to the philosophy of the other side, they would have to prevent the University of Virginia insignia from being worn to school, the U.S. Army, the state of Virginia emblem, the Seal of the United States and all kinds of free speech expressions.
Another we're involved with: A military guy, about 65, 70 years old, was sitting at home one night and the authorities showed up and said, "Put all your guns in a pile, we're taking them. We have an anonymous tip that you're suicidal." They carted off all this guy's guns. We got involved. It was just outrageous. We were very proud to stand with that gentleman, and we got him his firearms back.
Q: Does the NRA oppose the Brady Act, which requires background checks on gun buyers?
A: People really don't understand that. The Brady law was a wait, it wasn't a check; it was a wait for seven days while the government, if they wanted to, could do a check. The NRA offered an alternative to that, because we feel that – in fact, you had one here in California. You had a woman dial 9-1-1, say her ex-boyfriend was going to come by and kill her and please help me, I need the police, and the answer that she got back was, "Look there's really nothing we can do until he shows up. Call us if he gets there and creates a problem." That woman ought to have the right, as a law-abiding citizen, to go out and buy a firearm. He showed up, and she was killed that night. We offered an alternative amendment providing for a national instant check, just like they do a credit card check; that was adopted after a period of time, and the Brady bill actually sunsetted after, I think it was, five years into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Q: Some years ago in San Francisco at 101 California someone went into the building and killed many people. There was a lot of discussion at that time about the Brady Act.
A: As I said, the Brady law was a wait; it didn't provide for a check. You have the National Instant Check System. The NRA's been trying to get their records up to speed. Then there's been a fight where the people that don't like firearms have been trying to create a federal file of all law-abiding people in this country that own firearms. We've been saying, It never would have passed in the first place if you were going to put all law-abiding people through that check and then put their names in federal files.
What you are talking about – you had some pressure come out of that for what the media has called the "assault rifle ban." But that's all gotten distorted. Dianne Feinstein talks about all the terms I used to mention: "fully automatic," "guns that are convertible to fully automatic guns" – it's illegal to sell those under federal law. None of these guns on this ban list of so-called "assault rifles" make bigger holes, are more powerful, shoot faster, are convertible to machine guns – all you're talking about are guns with a few cosmetic features. That law says you can only have one cosmetic feature if you have a detachable magazine. It means nothing in the real world. The same guns are being made as before; they've dropped one or two cosmetic features.
The people that want to ban guns have a history of saying anything, and a lot of the national media gives those statements legs, without doing their homework. Gun owners understand that. Gun owners resent the inaccuracies and untruths that come out of the national media and gun-control advocates. That's why you get into an election like 2000, you have 10,000-15,000 people at the polls in Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia, Missouri, Ohio yelling "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!"
Q: A question about Al Gore's support of gun control legislation in the year 2000: How much of a detriment was that to his campaign?
A: President Clinton said on "60 Minutes" that he thought it probably cost him the election. I agree. I used to work with Al Gore in the Senate; he voted pro-Second Amendment every time. Suddenly – and this is a huge mistake the Democratic Party makes – he decides he wants to go national, and he flips his position, because he'll be more popular at some elite cocktail parties in New York City and Washington. For the next eight years you had him trying to center the gun issue for the election along with President Clinton: sue the gun manufacturers out of business. They went as far as to say there is no Second Amendment, it applies only to the government. They tried to put the firearms companies under operating control of the federal government, with a five-man board to have oversight. Janet Reno proposed with Al Gore that the government look into taking federal tests before you could buy guns.
I kept saying, "They gotta be crazy. This makes no political sense." I knew they'd figured out about August 2000 that they'd made a big political mistake. Suddenly Al Gore is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. If you remember the Convention, remember Al Gore with Tommy Lee Jones at Harvard, going out and plinking cans? When Charlton Heston was doing a rally in Tennessee, the Gore campaign called and asked Heston to also relay to the crowd that Gore was pro-Second Amendment, pro-firearms – the whole crowd broke out laughing. I was at Harvard after the 2000 election with Steve Rosenthal, head of the AFL-CIO's political operation. The polling Harvard did showed gun ownership among union members runs from a low, in California, of 43 percent to a high of 70-80 percent in Tennessee, Arkansas and West Virginia. Of the union households that had a firearm, approximately 50 percent voted for Bush as opposed to Gore, based on the gun issue – and that was the election right there.
The typical Democratic campaign, lately, has been more a prototype of Mark Warner in Virginia when he ran for governor, saying he is pro-Second Amendment, and current laws need to be enforced. The landscape is littered with Democrats that turned on the Second Amendment and were defeated at the polls. Every time I see a Democrat like Dianne Feinstein or Charlie Schumer on national television bashing guns, I can just see Terry McAuliffe sitting at the DNC cringing, because he knows the politics of it and it's a big mistake.
Q: I'm sure there are many articles all over the country making the statement that the issue of gun control is shifting toward the middle. It seems as if both President Bush and probable candidate Kerry are supporting some gun legislation, particularly the ban on assault weapons.
A: I do not see a shift on this issue. In fact, if anything, I think the Second Amendment side is more powerful than ever. If you look at John Kerry's web site, it talks about how he's a hunter and a dreamer, the fact he likes to go out in a field, watch a bird rise up in the air and shoot it. And he likes to eat turkey, quail, dove and all kinds of birds; he also likes to gut them, and gut deer. That's a statement about how powerful this issue is. John Kerry as a senator – every vote you cast you try to gut the Second Amendment. The American public resents that; they see straight through it.
Q: Who should and who should not own a gun?
A: All law-abiding free people ought to be able to own firearms. The law pretty well lists the categories of people that for one reason or another have forfeited that freedom. We know from programs like Project Exile we backed in Richmond, Virginia – if you put the word out that if you're a violent felon, a violent gang member, and you touch a firearm you're going to be prosecuted and you're going to prison – you can change criminal behavior. We cut the murder rate in Richmond by 60 percent the first year. That's what we need to do nationwide. It's against the law for felons to own guns; if a drug dealer touches a gun it's ten years in federal prison; if someone is smuggling guns illegally, the penalty is five years per gun. We've got tons of gun laws. We need to enforce them against the bad guys and leave the good guys alone.
Q: What do you say to law enforcement figures that show how many people are shot with their own guns by intruders in their homes?
A: Let me answer with two questions. One, how do police feel? The NRA is one of the largest police organizations in the USA. We have tens of thousands of police members. Rank and file overwhelmingly favor the Second Amendment. They want criminals prosecuted and taken off the street. They say the biggest problem is they risk their lives to pick up the criminals and courts turn them back on the street. You also see a layer of "political chiefs"; a lot of them work for some big-city, anti-gun mayors. The media will make them a darling if they say something. And they are not representative of rank and file.
Second: One of our problems on this issue is phony statistics. You're talking about that Kellermann study: You're 43 times more likely to be injured with a gun in your home than to use it against an intruder; it's a phony study. It was done by this man Kellermann at Emory University. He cooked the research: eliminated all uses of self-defense of a firearm unless you killed the person right on the property, then he added in suicides, which distorted the study by 500 percent. Another is the "13 children a day." You hear that all the time. They give the public the impression they're little kids; they're 15-, 16-, 17-, 18- and 19-year-old violent juveniles. Everything they're doing with a gun is already illegal. They ought to be prosecuted and they're not, and they're the ones that are gang members, and that's who's doing the killing. "Friends and acquaintances" is another one you hear, making it sound like your neighbor might shoot you if he owes a firearm. The "friends and acquaintances" are actually criminals knowing criminals.
Q: The House passed a bill protecting the fast food Industry from lawsuits that would blame the industry for illnesses caused by obesity of Americans. Isn't this similar to the clause in the Senate's recently passed assault weapons bill whereby gun dealers are protected against suits by individuals harmed by guns used in the transition of a crime?
A: The individual is ultimately responsible, and Americans seciety as a whole needs to get back in terms of that. About the gun lawsuits: The gun industry is regulated by the federal government from plant to purchaser, manufacturer to dealer. A dealer has to sell every new gun through his books. If he takes one gun off his books it's a federal felony. If he has a gun stolen from him and doesn't report it to the federal government in 48 hours, it's a federal felony. A dealer cannot deliver a gun without calling the federal government, going through the National Instant Check System and having the federal government say it's okey to hand over the gun. Under the bill we are backing, they could be sued if they make a defective product, breach contract, breach a warranty or have a defective design that leads to injury. The only thing this bill would stop is if a manufacturer sells a legal firearm legally and some criminal later breaks into your house, steals the gun and misuse it in a crime. They want to sue the manufacturer out of business for the illegal act of that criminal. If we get to the point where you're going to start holding the manufacturer responsible for criminal actions, we're not going to have a car made in this country, we're not going to have a pharmaceutical product and we're not going to have a firearm.
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein