NRA CEO Responds to State of the Union Address
By: NBC News
Updated: February 15, 2013
The National Rifle Association's CEO on Thursday accused President Barack Obama of orchestrating a "charade" to dismantle gun rights in his State of the Union address this week.
Wayne LaPierre, the gun lobby group's executive vice president and CEO, used a speech at a National Wild Turkey Federation conference in Nashville to decry the push for stricter gun laws made by Obama at the conclusion of his annual policy address on Tuesday.
"For our Second Amendment freedoms, Mr. President, we will stand and fight throughout this country as Americans for our freedoms," LaPierre said to applause. "We promise you that."
The gun rights advocate complained that "the words 'school safety' were nowhere to be found" in Obama's address and renewed his call for funding to put an armed guard in every school in America. (Obama did speak of the need to "protect our most precious resource: our children.")
"It was only a few weeks ago that they were marketing their anti-gun agenda as a way of protecting schoolchildren from harm," LaPierre said. "That charade ended at the State of the Union, when the president himself exposed their fraudulent intentions. It's not about keeping kids safe in school.... They only care about their decades-long, decades-old gun control agenda."
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