National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre on Sunday slammed "elite" focus on firearms in the wake of last week's Navy Yard shooting, saying there are bigger issues in play, including the need for more secure military facilities. 
 
 "The whole country...knows the problem was there weren't enough good guys with guns," LaPierre said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "When the good guys with guns got there, it stopped." 
 
 LaPierre said politicians and the media wrongly turned back to the gun control issue following the deadly shooting near the Capitol, when instead the country should emphasize reforming the mental health system and enforcing laws already on the books. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Manchin pessimistic on gun action) 
 
 "All the outrage...the first two days, of elite media and the politicians trying to stir this toward firearms, the outrage ought to be placed on an unprotected naval base," he said. "On a criminal justice system in Chicago that doesn't even enforce the federal gun laws when we could dramatically cut violence, on a mental health system that is completely broken, on a check system that is a complete joke in terms of stopping the bad guys," and a broken criminal justice system. 
 
 He said that Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, as well as several other perpetrators of gun crimes, were able to skirt current background check laws, some of which he noted the NRA initially supported. The mental health system is partly at fault, he said, saying people like Alexis, who have offered warning signs, "need to be committed, is what they need to be, and if they're committed they're not at the Naval Yard." 
 
 "So the Aurora shooter in Colorado gets checked, and is cleared," he said. "The Tucson shooter gets checked and gets cleared. Aaron Alexis goes through the federal and state check and gets cleared." 
 
 Read more about: NRA, Wayne LaPierre, Guns, Gun Control, Navy Yard Shooting ||||| The nation's largest gun-rights lobby called Friday for armed police officers to be posted in every American school to stop the next killer "waiting in the wings." 
 
 Under a flag at half-staff and a Christmas tree, traffic piles up along a main road in Newtown, Conn., Thursday, Dec. 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) (Associated Press) 
 
 The National Rifle Association broke its silence Friday on last week's shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school that left 26 children and staff dead. 
 
 The group's top lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre, said at a Washington news conference that "the next Adam Lanza," the man responsible for last week's mayhem, is planning an attack on another school. 
 
 "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said. 
 
 He blamed video games, movies and music videos for exposing children to a violent culture day in and day out. 
 
 "In a race to the bottom, many conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society, by bringing an even more toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty right into our homes," LaPierre said. 
 
 He refused to take any questions after speaking. Still, though security was tight, two protesters were able to interrupt LaPierre's speech, holding up signs that blamed the NRA for killing children. Both were escorted out, shouting that guns in schools are not the answer. 
 
 More than a dozen security officers checked media credentials at various checkpoints and patrolled the hotel ballroom. 
 
 LaPierre announced that former Rep. Asa Hutchison, R-Ark., will lead an NRA program that will develop a model security plan for schools that relies on armed volunteers. 
 
 The 4.3 million-member NRA largely disappeared from public debate after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., choosing atypical silence as a strategy as the nation sought answers after the rampage. The NRA temporarily took down its Facebook page and kept quiet on Twitter. 
 
 Since the slayings, President Barack Obama has demanded "real action, right now" against U.S. gun violence and called on the NRA to join the effort. Moving quickly after several congressional gun-rights supporters said they would consider new legislation to control firearms, the president said this week he wants proposals to reduce gun violence that he can take to Congress by January. 
 
 Obama has already asked Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and pass legislation that would stop people from purchasing firearms from private sellers without a background check. Obama also has indicated he wants Congress to pursue the possibility of limiting high-capacity magazines. ||||| MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, addresses recent calls for tighter gun control during a news conference in Washington on Friday. 
 
 Less than two hours after the moment of silence for the dead of Newtown, after the solemn sound of church bells ringing for the children and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary on the last school morning before Christmas, there was Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, calling for more guns in America, not fewer. 
 
 So LaPierre wasn’t just the biggest gun guy in the whole country on Friday, he was the dumbest, and most delusional, and most dangerous. 
 
 “Some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain,” LaPierre said, but that is exactly what he did in a phony, tone-deaf, self-serving speech that was the opposite of what we saw and heard from President Obama last Sunday night in Newtown. 
 
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 Here was LaPierre — whose organization and lobbyists have aggressively targeted any politician in this country who tries to take away a single gun — using this moment to blame the media and video games and the movies for what happened in Newtown, everything except the kind of assault rifle that should be illegal for any civilian anywhere. 
 
 On a morning when protesters were carried out of a ballroom in Washington, D.C., where LaPierre spoke screaming about the NRA and blood and guns, you kept waiting for LaPierre to be carried out, shrieking that the bad guys are coming for him and for all us. Somehow he thought it was completely proper one week after Newtown to make the NRA some kind of victim of Sandy Hook Elementary. 
 
 Evan Vucci/AP 
 
 At a time when the NRA and its leadership had a chance to join with the President and Congress to look for meaningful solutions in a country where schools and shopping malls and colleges and Army bases and churches are turned into shooting ranges, LaPierre basically talks about forming his own private militia — better than porn for a big gun guy like him — and sounds like someone who is not only out of touch with his own country, but his own membership. 
 
 He does not want a single new gun law, does not talk about taking a single gun off the street, or making it more difficult for just about anybody to get a gun at a gun show in too many parts of this country. Instead he wants to lecture the room and the American people about what the definition of a machine gun is. 
 
 In LaPierre’s weird view of the world, the solution to everything is to make every elementary school and middle school and high school and college campus into some version of “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” 
 
 Paul Morigi/AP Images for Avaaz 
 
 More people got shot up at Virginia Tech than they did at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown. So how many armed guards does it take to make safe the spread-out expanse of a normal college campus? LaPierre talks about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns and doesn’t just sound like he’s the bad guy with guns, he sounds like some crazy survivalist. 
 
 This wasn’t about protecting dead children on Friday, one week and a couple of hours after Newtown. It was about protecting his association. LaPierre was more worried about his members on Friday than the dead of Newtown. 
 
 And LaPierre didn’t take any questions, so nobody got to ask him this one: Did he really think that if it wasn’t legal for Nancy Lanza, the mother of the shooter, to own an assault rifle, that she would have owned one? 
 
 LaPierre’s solution is a “police officer in every single school and a protection plan for every single school.” More guns! He talks about the Secret Service guarding one President and makes it sound simple to establish a Secret Service for every school in America. 
 
 Of course the NRA will train the muscle and arm it and supply it, which makes you start to wonder just how much gun money and blood money they are making at the NRA, in this Tombstone, Ariz., vision of America in the 21st century that is more violent than any video game or movie that LaPierre talked about on this day. 
 
 “There is no national one-size-fits-all (solution) to protect our children,” LaPierre said, and he was right about that, like some dumb blindfolded squirrel actually finding an acorn. 
 
 Only he did not provide a solution in his big moment, he offered a doomsday version of America that does not just disqualify him from this conversation, it ought to get him fired, unless the responsible gun-lovers in the NRA want this guy continuing as their voice and face in a post-Newtown world. 
 
 With a chance to show some real grace, and perhaps offer real solutions, LaPierre of the NRA chose to once again attack anybody who opposes him, to act as if he were running for something on the week after Newtown. That didn’t just make him delusional on Friday. It made him a bum. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Jonathan Allen 
 
 NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — In his first public remarks since last week's deadly shooting at a high school in Florida, Wayne LaPierre, leader of the National Rifle Association, told a conservative convention on Thursday that gun control advocates care more about destroying liberty than protecting kids. 
 
 "Opportunists wasted not one second to exploit tragedy for political gain," LaPierre, executive vice president of the nation's most prominent gun-rights lobbying organization, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. 
 
 In a wide-ranging speech stocked with red meat for conservatives and attacks on Democrats, LaPierre called for increased school security, repeatedly ripped the "rogue" leadership of the FBI and blasted the left for promoting a "socialist" agenda. 
 
 Name-checking a long list of prospective Democratic 2020 presidential candidates and lawmakers like Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a leading advocate for gun control measures, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, along with the "national media," LaPierre condemned those he said were "eager to smear" the NRA. 
 
 "For them, it's not a safety issue," he said of protecting students. "It's a political issue." 
 
 Schumer quickly fired back on Twitter. 
 
 "The NRA is once again spewing pathetic, out of touch ideas, blaming everything but guns," Schumer said. 
 
 The NRA is once again spewing pathetic, out of touch ideas, blaming everything but guns. In the past, even after horrible shootings and empathetic words, President Trump and Congressional Republicans have toed the NRA line. 1/2 — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) February 22, 2018 
 
 LaPierre's remarks came the day after President Donald Trump and his aides outlined plans to combat mass shootings: Tighten the national background-check system, raise the age for buying semi-automatic weapons to 21, and allow some teachers and school officials to carry firearms on campuses. 
 
 Calling schools "wide open, soft targets for anyone bent on mass murder," LaPierre said that banks, jewelry stores, movie stars and politicians are "all more protected than our children." 
 
 "We must immediately harden our schools," he said. 
 
 But the NRA chief didn't limit himself to guns or their potential effect on school safety. LaPierre went after the FBI for failing to prevent the shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week, and blasted "corruption" within the bureau's ranks. 
 
 Those advocating for gun control in the wake of the shooting want "to sweep right under the carpet the failure of school security, the failure of family, the failure of America's mental health system, and even the unbelievable failure of the FBI," he said. 
 
 A top FBI official admitted Thursday the bureau made a mistake in not properly handling a report it had received about the Florida shooter before he attack the school. Acting FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said that while it was "a tragedy" that a tip about the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, was never passed along to local investigators, the FBI is determined to fix the problem. 
 
 Shortly before LaPierre took the stage, Trump praised him and NRA staff as "Great People and Great American Patriots" on Twitter. 
 
 NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, a favorite of Tea Party activists, spoke before LaPierre and said major media organizations cover mass shootings based on race and ratings. 
 
 "Many in legacy media love mass shootings," Loesch said. "You love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold." 
 
 She went on to say that the media ignore the shooting deaths of people of color in Chicago. 
 
 LaPierre said the NRA's critics are interested only in eliminating liberty for Americans — not preventing more shootings. 
 
 "They hate the NRA. They hate the Second Amendment. They hate individual freedom," he said. 
 
 "To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun," LaPierre added. 
 
 Speaking shortly after LaPierre, Vice President Mike Pence struck a more conciliatory tone, saying Americans "mourn with those who mourn and grieve with those who grieve." 
 
 Where LaPierre warned gun control was a subversive liberal plot to enable authoritarianism, Pence praised Trump's recent call for Congress to strengthen background checks and his call to government regulators to restrict bump stocks that can speed up semi-automatic weapon fire. 
 
 Pence said he would "pray for God's wisdom that all of us in positions of authority might find a way to come together with American solutions to confront and end this evil in our time." He lamented that the aftermath of the shooting had brought "a time of too much division and too much anger in America." 
 
 Pence did not address Trump’s proposal, reiterated on Twitter Thursday morning, to train and arm teachers around the country in order to deter a "sicko shooter" from firing on students. ||||| The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a congressional event on Saturday in Arizona has forced political leaders to confront a pair of chilling realities: The line between politics and violence has become less clear, and their need to be accessible to their constituents carries physical risks. 
 
 “The struggle members have is maintaining that balance of openness and accessibility with that real concern that there’s a freak out there that will do the unthinkable,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), whose office sits next to Giffords,’ told POLITICO. 
 
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 reset VIDEO: House colleagues react VIDEO: Post-shooting politics POLITICO 44 
 
 Indeed, while lawmakers have been increasingly concerned in recent years that virulent rhetoric would escalate into violence, many of them have struggled to calibrate a response that neither ignores the problem nor encourages it. 
 
 As Giffords battled to survive the bullet fired through her brain, it was abundantly clear Saturday that no one in politics can afford to take the prospect of violence lightly: When lawmakers say they are apprehensive about a public backlash against their actions, their fear is now no longer limited to losing their next race. 
 
 “We can be shot down in our district, but we can also be shot walking over to the Capitol,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told POLITICO in an interview Saturday night. “We have a lot of people outside who appear to be fragile emotionally. So we don’t know when one will walk up and shoot us down. We’re vulnerable, and there’s no real way to protect us.” 
 
 A message sent from Sergeant at Arms Bill Livingood to House members and aides Saturday implicitly underscored Waters’ point. 
 
 The security advice from Livingood: “[I]mmediately report circumstances that appear suspicious, and if you are scheduled to be in a public forum (town hall meetings, rallies, etc.), and feel uncertain about your safety, immediately contact the U.S. Capitol Police Threat Assessment Section or the Sergeant at Arms.” 
 
 For most of the past two years — a period of economic distress and political tumult — lawmakers and their aides have struggled to understand and control voter antipathy toward public officials, which hit a fevered pitch during debate over the new health care law during the last Congress. 
 
 “We have seen this country go through these things during times of great stress,” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said in an interview Saturday night. Recalling that then Sen. Lyndon Johnson was spat upon in Dallas a few years before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated there in 1963, Dingell expressed concern not only about the escalation of political intimidation but also said he is “particularly troubled when I hear people in high public office urge violence.” 
 
 The rhetoric of the last campaign certainly had its controversial flourishes. 
 
 During her challenge to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Republican nominee Sharron Angle raised the prospect of “2nd amendment remedies.”. And freshman Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) once said that citizens should be “well armed” because the government can be tyrannical. 
 
 Dingell said it’s incumbent upon citizens, led by political figures, to reject violence. 
 
 “The American people have to say this is simply unacceptable,” he said, adding that “as public officials we’re expected to lead” on that.
– The NRA's Wayne LaPierre is taking on renewed debate over gun control in wake of the Navy Yard shooting, telling NBC today that the "outrage" of "the elite media and the politicians trying to stir this toward firearms ... ought to be placed on an unprotected naval base. On a criminal justice system in Chicago that doesn't even enforce the federal gun laws when we could dramatically cut violence, on a mental health system that is completely broken, on a check system that is a complete joke in terms of stopping the bad guys." A further rundown of his comments, as per Politico: "The whole country knows the problem was there weren't enough good guys with guns. When the good guys with guns got there, it stopped." The mental health system is broken down, LaPierre says, and people like Aaron Alexis "need to be committed, and if they're committed they're not at the Naval Yard. So the Aurora shooter in Colorado gets checked, and is cleared. The Tucson shooter gets checked and gets cleared. Aaron Alexis goes through the federal and state check and gets cleared." Elsewhere on the Sunday dial, also as per Politico: Joe Manchin on whether he would renew his failed gun control effort: "Not unless there’s a movement. I’m not gonna go out there and just beat the drum for the sake of beating the drum. There has to be people willing to move off the position they've taken." Henry Kissenger on Syria: "There could be quite a good outcome because if we get the chemical weapons, it then becomes a basis for a transition in Syria that leads to relative peace. Then at the end of the day, however tortuously we arrived at this conclusion, it will have served the interest of the world." Nancy Pelosi on GOP demands for spending cuts: "The cupboard is bare. There's no more cuts to make. We all want to reduce the deficit. Put everything on the table, review it, but you cannot have any more cuts just for the sake of cuts. Right now you’re taking trophies." Claire McCaskill on a potential government shutdown: "I don't think in America we should throw tantrums when we lose elections and threaten to shut down the government and refuse to pay the bills. The American people had a choice last November. They had a choice between someone who said repeal ObamaCare, and President Obama."