This interview with Wayne LaPierre on this Sunday's Meet the Press ended up going pretty well the way I expected it would, which is with David Gregory hitting LaPierre with some difficult questions, but doing what he usually does and going easy on him with any follow up. Why NBC felt the need to give this guy a national platform to repeat the same talking points he made during his bizarre press conference the other day is beyond me.
After allowing LaPierre to blame our problems with gun violence in the United States on everything from a lack of armed guards in our schools, to our mental health system and on anything and everything other than guns, LaPierre said this about the gun show loophole.
LAPIERRE: Now, I know where you're going with this. They come up with this whole... the gun show loophole. There's not a gun show loophole. It's illegal for felons to do anything like that, to buy guns. What the anti-Second Amendment wants to do is put every gun sale in the country under the thumb of the federal government. Congress debated this at length. They said if you're a hobbyist or collector, if someone in West Virginia, a hunter wants to sell a gun to another hunter, they ought to be able to do it without being under the thumb of the federal government.
So he basically defended the loophole while claiming it doesn't exist. And David Gregory continued by trying to reason with someone who is not a rational or reasonable person.
GREGORY: What I hear you saying is, well, you can't do anything about high capacity ammunition magazines, because it simply won't work, yet you're proposing things that you don't know will completely work, but you're into the art of the possible, because your standard is, anything that has a chance of working we ought to try, except when it has to do with guns or ammunition. Don't you see that people see that as a complete dodge?
I don't know why David Gregory ever thought he was going to get an honest answer to that question. The man is paid to represent the gun manufacturers and their interests. That's it.
About all I can say after watching the entire interview with LaPierre is that it's too bad Lawrence O'Donnell wasn't allowed to sneak into the studio and ask him questions.
