I actually thought LaPierre looked terrible today. He wasn’t coherent in some of his arguments, and he was literally foaming at the mouth.
For instance, he allowed Gregory to get away with saying that at Columbine and Virginia Tech, there were armed guards already and they didn’t prevent the shootings. Well, at Columbine, the guard was off campus at the time and had to come back when he heard the reports. That’s why he could only engage the shooters from the parking lot until backup arrived. Had he been INSIDE the school when the shooters arrived, he may have stopped them much sooner. At Virginia Tech, the police arrived at the building within 3 minutes, but it took them 5 minutes to get through the doors that the shooter had chained up before he started shooting. That was all the time he needed. In addition, a college campus is an entirely different animal than a high school, which should be a fairly closed campus with very limited entrances. That’s why college students need the right to carry concealed.
Also, on the issue of the magazines, all he had to say was “David, what difference does it make it the magazine holds 10 rounds or 30 rounds if we can’t stop the behavior that is causing these shootings? What is the acceptable number of dead kids?”
For some reason VT, which has more than its fairshare of engineering talent, neglected to make the simple door latch replacement that would have allowed the cops to get inside in less than 5 minutes!
My understanding is they still have the old design in place ~ no change there ~ but they've quit using the building for classroom space ~ for which it wasn't designed anyway.
The inmates continue to be in charge of the asylum down there.
Lapierre could have done better in that exchange sequence, but Gregory didn’t make any real headway in his loony lefty argument.
As I recall, LaPierre alluded to other ways of driving up the body count and that limiting mag capacity is not one of them. It’s easy to switch out 5 or 10 rd mags quickly and/or use more than one gun. Advertising “gun free zones” is nothing but a neon sign for kooks. Gregory’s dumb statement can be turned around on him as he would accept more dead than less if there is no gun can counter murderous carnage.
Moreover, Lanza could have used a .22 LR squirrel rifle in that confined area of huddled Sandy Hook 1st graders where the result would have been just the same.
In the end, it takes a gun to stop a gun.