NRA chief: Gun controls won’t pass Congress

IVAN MORENO

KRISTEN WYATT

Asso­ci­ated Press

DENVER — The head of the National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion said Thurs­day he’s con­fi­dent that Con­gress won’t approve an assault weapons ban or a limit on high-capacity ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines after mass shoot­ings in Col­orado and Connecticut.

David Keene pre­dicted fail­ure for all con­gres­sional mea­sures related to guns, includ­ing expanded back­ground checks for gun purchases.

“I tell you what these things are. These are all feel-good pro­pos­als, because at the end of the day, what do they do to pre­vent” a mass shooter? asked Keene, the NRA’s president.

Keene was in Den­ver to talk to Colorado’s Demo­c­ra­tic gov­er­nor, John Hick­en­looper, and state law­mak­ers. He met with The Asso­ci­ated Press for an inter­view before sit­ting down with state offi­cials. He talked about prospects for fed­eral gun con­trol mea­sures under dis­cus­sion in Con­gress and pre­dicted polit­i­cal peril for Democ­rats who sup­port such bills.

“The Senate’s where the action’s going to be,” Keene said. “The House is sort of sit­ting back, and you can almost hear the House Repub­li­can lead­er­ship say­ing under their breath, ‘You know, go ahead. We’ve got a few mem­bers that wouldn’t mind sit­ting in the Sen­ate. If you do this, maybe they will.’ So the Sen­ate lead­er­ship is much more cautious.”

Col­orado U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, a Demo­c­rat, said he dis­agreed with Keene’s asser­tion that Con­gress would do nothing.

“In the wake of recent mass shoot­ings, includ­ing one in Col­orado, the sta­tus quo on gun vio­lence is sim­ply unac­cept­able,” Udall said in a state­ment. “Col­oradans expect and deserve bet­ter than con­tin­ued inac­tion from Con­gress. I sim­ply dis­agree that Con­gress can­not or should not try to reduce mass shoot­ings and gun violence.”

In recent weeks, Keene has become an increas­ingly pub­lic fig­ure for the pow­er­ful gun rights group in the ongo­ing debate on gun con­trol. He has offered a softer, if equally staunch voice for the gun lobby’s ideas as com­pared with Wayne LaPierre, the fiery exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent who remains the NRA’s most promi­nent voice on the pub­lic stage.

Keene has been active with the NRA for decades, start­ing as a board mem­ber before being elected the group’s pres­i­dent in 2011.

Keene on Thurs­day called uni­ver­sal back­ground checks a polit­i­cal “sweet spot” but said the plan won’t work in prac­tice. He said cur­rent back­ground check sys­tems are under­funded and that requir­ing back­ground checks on pri­vate sales would be a logis­ti­cal mess.

The NRA pres­i­dent indi­cated he wants to tour the nation and meet with more state offi­cials about loom­ing gun con­trol pro­pos­als. How­ever, he dis­missed the idea of meet­ing with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Demo­c­rat who enacted the first gun con­trol mea­sure in the nation fol­low­ing the Sandy Hook school massacre.

“There really isn’t any rea­son­able dis­cus­sion you can have with him,” Keene said of Cuomo.

Colorado’s gov­er­nor has called for uni­ver­sal back­ground checks, even on neighbor-to-neighbor sales. His gun pos­ture has shifted some­what from July, in the days fol­low­ing the Aurora movie the­ater shoot­ing that killed 12 and injured dozens. Hick­en­looper said then that stricter laws would not have pre­vented the mass shooting.

“I think Gov. Hick­en­looper had it right after the Aurora shoot­ing,” Keene said. “He said it’s not the laws, it’s these kinds of people.”

Keene said James Holmes, the man charged with the attack, likely couldn’t have been stopped, not even with expanded men­tal health flags in a gun database.

Holmes met with a psy­chi­a­trist before the the­ater shoot­ing but report­edly was not deemed a dan­ger. He spent months amass­ing an arse­nal, both online and at retail gun stores, and passed back­ground checks.

“What we have argued is that if some­one has been adju­di­cated in one way or another to have been, to be poten­tially vio­lent and men­tally ill, they should be in the sys­tem,” Keene said. “We’re not talk­ing about any­body who vis­its a psychiatrist.”

Hick­en­looper has pro­posed enhanced men­tal health ser­vices. But he told the Demo­c­ra­tic Leg­is­la­ture in a Jan­u­ary address, “It’s not enough to pre­vent dan­ger­ous peo­ple from get­ting weapons.”

Col­orado Sen­ate Pres­i­dent John Morse also has sug­gested mak­ing weapons man­u­fac­tur­ers liable for dam­age caused by the prod­ucts they make, an idea that appears to con­flict with fed­eral law ban­ning such liability.

“I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what the bill can do and how to do it,” Morse said after meet­ing with Keene.

Colorado’s Leg­is­la­ture already has rejected sev­eral GOP pro­pos­als to reduce gun vio­lence, includ­ing a bill to allow school employ­ees to carry con­cealed weapons. Democ­rats pro­posed bills Thurs­day that would ban high-capacity mag­a­zines and clar­ify that con­cealed weapons are not allowed in col­leges and stadiums.

Posted by AP News on Feb 7 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.