Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association who galvanized the nation’s firearms debate on Friday with his call for armed guards in every school, is a former Democratic aide-turned-lobbying powerhouse who has come to personify the NRA’s fierce resistance to gun control.
LaPierre’s afternoon press conference — in which he blamed gun violence on everything from “blood-soaked films” and “vicious violent video games” to hurricanes and the Obama administration — displayed his pugnacious style in the most high-profile of settings. The address drew fierce condemnation from gun-control advocates.
In his first extensive public remarks since since last week’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, LaPierre said Congress should fund armed security guards “in every single school in this nation.’’
“Is the press and the political class here in Washington, D.C., so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and American gun owners,’’ LaPierre said, “that you’re willing to accept the world, where real resistance to evil monsters is [an] alone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life, her life, to shield those children in her care?’’
LaPierre, 63, effectively took over the Fairfax County organization in 1991 and is now executive vice president. He has specialized in stirring up both the NRA’s estimated 4 million members and his legions of political foes.
Earlier this year, he warned a conservative audience that President Obama’s reelection would mean that “America as we know it will be on its way to being lost forever.” After then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and others were wounded or killed in last year’s shooting rampage in Tucson, he said that “the acts of a deranged madman” should not cause restrictions on law-abiding gun owners.
The man who once called federal agents “jack-booted government thugs” (a comment he later apologized for) summarized his philosophy in a 1992 column for the NRA publication American Rifleman: “When you’re at war,’’ he wrote, “you do what it takes to win.”
LaPierre was paid more than $960,000 by the NRA and related organizations in 2010, according to the most recent NRA federal tax filings that could be located. Corporate records show he also has served on the board of several other organizations, including the American Association of Political Consultants, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the American Conservative Union.
The former PhD student at Boston University — who was once a Democratic Party legislative aide from Roanoke and drew a post-college job offer from liberal icon and then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill — has adopted that martial approach in Washington.
He was first hired at the 141-year-old NRA as a lobbyist in the late 1970s and rose to executive vice president in 1991. He took the association from its dusty downtown Washington offices to new high-tech digs in Northern Virginia, installing new computers and streamlining direct mail and fundraising.
“The NRA was run like an old-time club when I took over,” he recalled in a 2000 interview with The Washington Post. “We had huge financial problems; we were in the red and getting cut off from our membership.”
NRA’s Wayne LaPierre: the force behind the nation’s gun lobby
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NRA’s Wayne LaPierre: the force behind the nation’s gun lobby
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