What has the NRA had to say about the horror in Orlando? What have they said about the ability of one man to walk into a room with a military-style, rapid-fire semiautomatic rifle and shoot more than 100 people?
Here’s a hint: It’s not the sound of justifications and statistics rolling from their Twitter feed like rifle fire. It’s more like the sound that comes after. The silence.
But they’ve been plenty loud in the recent past. Last week’s comments included cheering for open carry in Florida and for a bill in Missouri that would let people carry however they want. They’ve also had plenty of things to say about the type of rifle carried by shooter Omar Mateen.
The AR-15 and similar weapons are not hunting rifles. Yes, you could point one at a deer, but it’s the wrong tool for the job and anyone doing so should forfeit their hunting license. This is what the AR-15 is for.
The madman who killed at least 50 people and wounded 53 others at an Orlando club early Sunday was armed with an AR-15-type rifle. It’s the same style of weapon used to slaughter 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. Earlier that year, James Holmes used an AR-15 to murder 12 people and wound 70 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.
That is what the AR-15 is for—shooting people in numbers. It’s not a fully automatic weapon. It’s not a machine gun. However, it can fire a dozen rounds in a second. It can fire as fast as the person holding the weapon can flutter the trigger. A 30-round magazine could be emptied in three seconds. It takes another three seconds to drop and replace that magazine. Then it’s shooting again. Anyone thinking that there’s going to be a fumbling pause in the gunfire hasn’t watched one of these guns at work. They’re designed to be used in the confusion of battle. They’re designed to be operated by green troops with little training. They’re designed to make it easy to do exactly what happened in Orlando.
The NRA was quick to respond after Columbine, and after the shooting that included Rep. Gabby Giffords, and again after the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. They even had the godawful press conference following Sandy Hook in which they blamed the deaths on a shortage of guns in school and called for arming kindergarten teachers.
But this isn’t the first time the NRA has come up quiet.
Last fall, in the wake of a string of horrors, the NRA was surprisingly silent.
The urge to do something in the wake of mass murders with firearms is so natural and widespread that the NRA has historically felt it, in its way. This year, that national interest in doing something has returned, over and again. There was the shootout between armed bikers last May at a Waco, Texas, restaurant that killed nine and injured 18. In June, there was Dylann Roof’s racially motivated murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. There was the Chattanooga, Tennessee, recruiting-center shooting and the Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater shooting and the late August killing of two Roanoke, Virginia, TV reporters by an ex-colleague, posted online for all to see. There was the Umpqua Community College shooting earlier this month, the deadliest in Oregon’s history, and the deadliest in America since 2013.
Amid this relentless carnage and a growing call for action, LaPierre has said…nothing.
But don’t think that’s because the NRA has developed a conscience. They’ve just taken their previous statements to their illogical conclusion. There’s nothing more to be said.
There is a school of thought in crisis communications that says you don’t feed a story with unnecessary public comment when you have nothing new to say. It’s possible this is the situation the NRA finds itself in today: Having gone from agreeing to close background-check loopholes to proposing more, not fewer, guns in schools in the span of two decades, the gun lobby may have reached the terminus of its product pipeline. Its policy position now seems so extreme that there’s nowhere else to go.