Friends and family members had barely returned from burying their children, brothers, sisters, friends, and fathers when the National Rifle Association (NRA) came out with both barrels blazing. Dana Loesch is the National Rifle Association (NRA) spokeswoman, and she stood on stage firing blame at the FBI and the media.
She spoke at the Conservative Action Conference and sarcastically called out the media in the back of the room, CNN reported:
‘I’ll say it really slowly so all the people on the platform in the back can hear me loud and clear: many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it. I’m not saying that you love the tragedy, but I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back.’
The NRA spokeswoman attended the CNN town hall the evening before with members of the Florida community where a 19-year-old man legally purchased an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle mowed down 14 students and three staff members. At the conference, she condemned the media for how it covered the tragedy, saying it was a network ratings grab .
Loesch asked where was Chicago’s CNN town hall:
‘There are thousands of grieving black mothers in Chicago every weekend and you don’t see town halls for them. Where’s the CNN town hall for Chicago? Where’s the CNN town hall for sanctuary cities?’
She must have missed the one where CNN’s Anderson Cooper invited President Barack Obama to a Virginia town hall meeting on violence in 2016. President Obama took questions from gun violence victims and a boy from Chicago who was afraid of being shot. A gun executive, a sheriff, and a murder victim’s widow asked him questions.
President Obama invited the NRA, too, but it refused to meet with him, even after multiple invitations.
The NRA remained virtually silent for a week. Then, the friendly conference crowd cheered Loesch. She said the FBI failed to follow procedures that would have caught the mass shooters in the net of background checks, according to CNN:
‘My condemnation is for those at the FBI, I know there are good FBI agents there, who dropped the ball eight separate times with catastrophic consequences.’
The NRA spokeswoman continued, blaming former FBI director, James Comey:
‘James Comey, when he wasn’t busy taking directions from Loretta Lynch as to what to call Hillary Clinton’s investigation or writing self-aggrandizing memoirs, said that they made a mistake. Maybe if you politicized your agency less and did your job more, we wouldn’t have those problems.’
Loesch asserted in her Conservative Action Conference speech that following the town hall meeting, she had to have private security assist her as she left the night before:
‘(Because) there were people rushing the stage and screaming “burn her.”‘
At the CNN town hall meeting, the Florida Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel, shut Loesch down, Huffington Post reported that he said:
‘I understand that you’re standing up for the NRA … but you just told this group of people that you’re standing up for them. You are not standing up for them until you say, “I want less weapons.”‘
Featured Images via MSNBC Twitter Page Screen Grab.
