Raffling Off Assault Rifles - NYTimes.com The Republican Party of Rhode Island is attracting well-deserved scorn for its plan to raise money Sunday by raffling an AR-15-style assault rifle - the same sort of modified military weapon used last December in the Newtown school massacre in neighboring Connecticut. The rifle is the main prize at the state Republican Party's "2nd Amendment celebration" at a rod and gun club in West Greenwich - "a family day at the range full of targets, food, prizes and fun," but truly devoid of even rudimentary sensitivity to the carnage inflicted on Americans from weapons devised not for sport but for the battlefield. The state party is in lock step with the National Rifle Association, which will run its own online "banned guns" raffle later this month, offering a dozen assault rifles that the association triumphantly notes Congress failed to ban after the Newtown schoolhouse massacre. Some state Republicans with an eye on future elections are having nothing to do with their raffle, which Dawson Hodgson, the deputy Republican minority leader in the State Senate, described as "tone deaf and insensitive, at best." But the state party chairman, Mark Smiley, is standing by the raffle and its $5 chance to empower some citizen with a gleaming Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle. "I suppose putting it in the press will bump up ticket sales and help raise more money for the R.I.G.O.P.," said Brian Newberry, the House Republican minority leader, of the negative publicity surrounding the event. Party leaders are trying to take cover by righteously noting the raffle winner must submit to a background check. Background checks, of course, remain one of the more porous parts of gun safety law. Grotesque gun raffles are more proof of the gap between the anguish of the citizenry at repeated shooting sprees and the complacency of the politicians who do so little to address them.