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HOUSTON – Outside a National Rifle Association convention besieged by high-profile cancellations following a massacre at a Texas elementary school, protesters gathered Friday to demand gun control and responses to the authorities.
Republican lawmakers who chose to keep their speech plans at the annual meeting sounded a different note: challenge.
Former President Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), among other speakers, widely rejected proposals for new restrictions and called for more security checks. school or mental health, while issuing warnings of alleged Democratic plots to take up arms.
The NRA has weakened. But gun rights push the GOP more than ever.
“We all know they want total gun confiscation, we know this would be a first step,” Trump told the crowd in an auditorium about 300 miles from the site of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. “Once they take the first step, they’ll take the second step, the third, the fourth, and then you’ll have a completely different look at the Second Amendment.”
Fiery speeches contrasted with a moment of silence celebrated at the convention by 19 children and two teachers killed on Tuesday in a mass murder that has once again raised calls for Democrats and advocates of new security measures with weapons. Even more compelling than after the Sandy Hook elementary school killings nearly a decade ago, however, the NRA sent a clear message that the lobby and its supporters do not see the new restrictions as negotiable.
GOP spokesmen shift the blame for the latest tragedy on the availability of high-powered weapons to a number of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, harassment and networking. social, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health. services, multiple points of entry to schools and open doors.
The speakers also went from condemning the evil of the Uvalde school shooter to slandering the “elites”, the media, the Democrats and the “communist Marxists”, to the applause of the incompetent but vocal people.
“The elites who dominate our culture tell us that guns are at the root of the problem,” Cruz said. “It is much easier to slander one’s own political opponents and demand that responsible citizens lose their constitutional rights than to examine cultural disease, leading to indescribable acts of evil.”
Abbott, who appeared in a recorded message because he was at the same time holding a press conference in Uvalde that included criticism of law enforcement failures, rejected the new arms restrictions.
“Just as the laws did not stop the killer, we will not let his evil deeds prevent us from uniting the community he tried to destroy,” Abbott said in the video.
In the decade since Sandy Hook, the NRA has increasingly allied itself with the GOP, broadening its focus from gun rights to include other issues and grievances of the conservative culture war, and betting heavily on Trump. in the 2016 campaign. The NRA used Friday’s event to project strength after years of unrest as the organization fights a lawsuit from the New York Attorney General alleging that executives spent funds .
The ANR went ahead with the program despite calls for it to be moved, postponed or canceled out of respect for the victims of Uvalde. A growing crowd of protesters in the park across the street shouted “Shame” at attendees as they entered the convention center. In an interview before the speeches, NRA board member David A. Keene said the organization did not consider modifying the program because it would upset the thousands of people who made plans to attend.
Other board members were more punctual in their response to the criticism. “If we withdrew whenever there was controversy, we would not be worthy of anyone’s support,” said Robert L. Barr Jr., a former Georgia congressman.
Trump acknowledged the setback by tapping on the retired speakers, a list that included Texas Gov. Dan Patrick (right). “Unlike others, I didn’t disappoint in not introducing you,” he said.
Trump and Cruz pressed for hardening of school buildings, with Trump calling for the removal of unarmed school zones and Cruz saying schools should have a single door guarded by armed police or trained military veterans, a plan that would seem likely to face. security laws that require more than one exit to buildings. Cruz also called for bulletproof doors and closed classroom doors.
“As the old saying goes, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good one with a gun,” Trump said, citing NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s comment almost a decade ago. the mass school. shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
On Friday, LaPierre emphasized the NRA’s efforts to train schools and local authorities and advocated for more funding for security, despite growing questions about whether UValde law enforcement officers acted quickly enough to confront or stop the mass murder there.
“Restricting the fundamental human right of law-abiding Americans to defend themselves is not the answer,” LaPierre said. “We, the ANR, will never, ever stop fighting for the right of the innocent and law-abiding to defend themselves against the evil criminal element that affects our society because we know that there can be no freedom, no security, no security without the right of law-abiding people to bear arms for self-defense ”.
Trump also criticized federal aid to Ukraine, saying that if the United States could afford this and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government would have to build tougher schools. The Ukrainian line applauded a crowd that woke him up from reading the comments in plain affection. Later in his speech, Trump stepped away from gun rights to rehearse his standard demonstration material, with frequent shouts from the audience, including the chanting of a phrase that is code for a profane expression against the President Biden, and when Trump talked about the 2020 election, “We won!”
Trump went so far as to underestimate the social justice rallies that followed the assassination of George Floyd in 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer. “The same Democratic politicians who sparked riots over a single police assassination two years ago are falling asleep to the rising death toll from their own radical policies,” Trump said. Cruz called Chicago a “hell of a murder” to applaud the audience.
Trump said as president, he showed too much clemency with Democratic politicians who run big cities and would act differently if he were re-elected.
“If I ever do it again, that is, run for president and win, I would no longer feel compelled to do so,” Trump said. “I would crack down on violent crime like never before.”
Trump called a Fort Worth man named Jack Wilson who killed a gunman in his church in 2020. “You’re still my president,” Wilson told Trump as people in the audience stood up and cheered. .