Lawrence O'Donnell took NRA lobbyist Wayne LaPierre apart last year after the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. On this Monday evening's show, he did it again in the wake of the Aurora massacre.
O`DONNELL: In the Rewrite tonight, another huge win for the Grover Norquist of gun control, Wayne LaPierre. Wayne is the blood-drenched lobbyist who makes sure anyone in America, anyone can get 6,000 bullets, even people who want to use those bullets to shoot babies in movie theaters.
Wayne LaPierre is not a credit hog like Grover Norquist. Grover loves flexing his anti-tax lobbying muscles publicly. He loves calling senators idiots. He loves taking credit for preventing any consideration of sensible tax policy in this country.
Wayne is old school. Wayne LaPierre follows the old lobbyist playbook of never publicly taking credit for anything. Every time an American mass murderer uses the right that Wayne has preserved for any one in this country, including al Qaeda and homicidal maniacs, to buy insane amounts of ammunition, and then that mass murderer gets huge headlines, wall-to-wall cable news coverage, and comments from the president, Wayne LaPierre never takes credit for any of that. Never.
Wayne always does a kind of, aw shucks modesty thing and says, if I hadn`t made sure that that mass murderer could get thousands of bullets, he would have used something else to kill all those people. Talk about modesty, huh. Maybe some of our mass murderers would have found another way to kill a lot of people, but we`ll never know, will we? Because Wayne has just made it so easy, so very easy to kill babies with bullets, to kill fathers and mothers with bullets, to kill sons and daughters with bullets, to kill sisters and brothers with bullets.
Bullets are the American mass murderer`s first choice. And what we`ll never know is how many of them would be successful mass murderers today if Wayne LaPierre didn`t make sure they could easily get bullets, unlimited supplies of bullets. How many of our mass murderers would switch to making bombs if they couldn`t get bullets?
And how many of them would blow themselves up by mistake while making bombs and never hurt anyone else? Surely a few of them. Just how determined are American mass murderers? We`ll never know, because Wayne LaPierre makes it so, so easy for mass murderers.
Wayne has not said a word about our most recent mass murder. On Friday, he had his press secretary put out this statement: "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the community. NRA will not have any further comment until all the facts are known."
See how modest Wayne is? He`s the head of the National Rifle Association, and he wouldn`t even put his name on yet another high-profile NRA press release about a mass murder. Wayne presumably spent the weekend enjoying the summer with family and friends, none of whom were shot by a mass murderer this weekend.
Wayne`s unlimited ammo-for-all policy has never negatively affected Wayne`s life in any way. I invited Wayne to come on this program tonight, but you know Wayne. Even when he deserves 24-hour media attention, Wayne LaPierre is the perfect picture of modesty, blood-drenched modesty.
