Wayne LaPierre

For a second night on Thursday, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on his The Last Word show tried to blame NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre for inspiring the ricin-tainted letters recently sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. The MSNBC host teased the show:

On Wednesday's The Last Word show, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell tried to link rhetoric by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre to the ricin attack on New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he played several clips of LaPierre criticizing the liberal mayor's support for gun control before getting to the story of ricin-tainted letters. After running the clips, O'Donnell ominously related:

ABC reporters over the weekend huffed that the National Rifle Association took a "victory lap" and sneered that the gun group was "using" the Boston bombing at their recent convention. Reporter Reena Ninan on Sunday chided, "NRA leaders found a way to use the recent bombings in Boston, even shooting tragedies, to expand support for their organization."

On Monday's Good Morning America, correspondent Jon Karl worried, "When it comes to guns, don't expect this crowd to give in on anything." He then parroted Ninan, insisting that the NRA "even invoked the manhunt for the Boston bombers." What Vice President Wayne LaPierre actually said in reference to Boston was this:

As per his 1994 NRA questionnaire, Joe Scarborough: Opposed an assault weapons ban.  Opposed expansion of background checks.  Opposed limitations on magazine sizes.  Today, he supports all such measures.  

So how would you describe his two very different sets of opinions?  Why, as being "very consistent," of course--if you're Joe Scarborough. On today's Morning Joe, responding to the NRA's promulgation of the NRA questionnaire he submitted in 1994 as an aspiring Republican congressman, Scarborough did indeed claim that his positions today, despite the multiple flip-flops, are "very consistent."  View the video after the jump.

Note to Piers Morgan: Journalism isn't rocket science and making a few phone calls can go a long way.

Giddy about a Newtown search warrant that showed there was an NRA certificate found in the Lanza household,  Morgan tweeted giddily: 

I want to hear Wayne LaPierre explain what checks they made on Adam Lanza before sending him a @nra certificate. #Newtown

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 28, 2013

Yet, this is an abject lie.

Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten -- a former editor of the newspaper's "Sunday Style" section --  is using his "humor" to pinch conservative "evil" again, this time in poetic form. On his weekly chat at washingtonpost.com, Weingarten's "Ode to Pure Evil" is about NRA chief Wayne LaPierre.

In case you don't want to read this entire attempt at rhyme, it ends with a saint shooting LaPierre in the crotch: "Methinks St. Peter will espy him, standing there / And smile, and aim a 30-30 at his scrotum." Did you know liberals wrote "hate poetry"? Here's how it was posted:

Letting down her guard on the Lean Forward network, Politico's Lois Romano, ostensibly an objective journalist, descended into biased -- and racially conscious -- commentary.  Appearing on MSNBC’s NewsNation on March 25, Romano made disparaging comments of the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

Speaking with host Tamron Hall -- who happens to be African-American -- Romano suggested that Wayne LaPierre is, “looking like a tired old white guy that is clinging on to something of the past.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.] 

On Sunday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory falsely claimed that 40 percent of all gun sales are done without background checks, Twitchy reported.

“But isn’t that preferable to a big loophole where you have all these — 40 percent of sales, private sales, one-on-one, where you’ve got no ability to trace it?” he asked NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre asked a marvelous question on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday.

"Why doesn't the national press corps, when they're sitting down there with Jay Carney and the president and the vice president, why don't they say, 'Why is Chicago dead last in enforcement of the gun laws against gangs with guns, felons with guns, drug dealers with guns?'" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bloomberg Businessweek ran a front-page attack on the NRA for its March 18-25 edition. Much of the story was spent interviewing the owners of the Mossberg gun factory from New Haven, Conn., who find the NRA’s position “ill timed and graceless.”

According to the article, not all gun makers take as strong of a position on gun control regulation as the NRA does, but those who disagree are afraid of speaking up. Businessweek claims that fear of NRA instigated consumer boycotts and the prospect of sales from those concerned about stricter gun control laws keep gun manufacturers in line.

“Who’s afraid of the NRA? Gun makers, that’s who,” the Businessweek article, written by Assistant Managing Editor and Senior Writer Paul M. Barrett, declared. The cover reads “DON’T TREAD ON THE NRA” with pictures of bullet holes tearing through it.

During a rousing speech that led to six standing ovations, Wayne LaPierre -- chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association -- told the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Friday that the “liberal media can keep on hating me, but I'm still standing.”

The speaker then turned his attention to a remark made on March 1 by Vice President Joe Biden that if anyone is in danger, he or she should take “that double barreled shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.” LaPierre told the Democratic official: “You keep your advice, we'll keep or guns.”

MSNBC's Toure Neblett made an extremely controversial statement on Friday's The Cycle.

"If Adam Lanza had walked into a black public school in this mythical South Brooklyn or in the Southside of Chicago, we would probably not be having a sustained national conversation about guns" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC, for the second time on Thursday, smeared the National Rifle Association as racist, trashing the gun group's president as appealing to bigotry. Now host Alex Wagner read from an op-ed by Wayne LaPierre in which he argues that owning a gun is the only real protection from crime, looting and riots. Specifically, LaPierre mentioned the aftermath to Hurricane Sandy and looting in Brooklyn.

Wagner quoted LaPierre: "Hurricanes, tornadoes, riots, terrorists, gangs, lone criminals, these are the perils we are sure to face. Not just maybe. It's not paranoia to buy a gun. It's survival." She then sneered, "There's also a lot of racial– racism imbedded in that full statement." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Novelist and guest Kurt Andersen mocked, "There were, not only not looters in south Brooklyn. Everybody was out helping everybody else...It was the opposite of that description." Except that there was looting in Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy.

Regular viewers of MSNBC know that network's anchors have an almost superhuman ability to find racism in any statement uttered from a conservative or Republican's mouth. Joe Scarborough showed off that talent, on Thursday's Morning Joe, when he claimed a recent op-ed by Wayne LaPierre was "laced with racial overtones" because the NRA president suggested Brooklynites should have the right to defend themselves from Hurricane Sandy looters and border state residents needed protection from violent gangs.

After reciting an excerpt from the LaPierre op-ed, Scarborough ranted: "Wayne LaPierre is suggesting if you are against Americans being able to own assault weapons with 30-round high-capacity magazines, that somehow you're going to-- and he said Hispanic drug gangs are coming to America, and those terrible people in Brooklyn, don't go out after dark. I mean, this is so laced with racial overtones." (video after the jump)

CNN's Piers Morgan is at it again.

The anti-gun advocate on Twitter Thursday called National Rifle Associate Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre "America's most dangerous man":

Ronald Reagan: RINO?  Cokie Roberts and Joe Scarborough have suggested the Gipper might be viewed that way by the modern-day Republican party, making him unelectable within GOP ranks.

After Joe Scarborough said that it was Reagan who rounded up Republican support for the assault weapon ban in 1984, Roberts exclaimed "I'm not sure Reagan could get elected within the Republican party today."  Scarborough concurred: "I don't know that he could." View the video after the jump.

Sarah Palin's profile might not be as high as it was a few years ago, but she apparently still serves as a convenient punching bag for the left.

On today's Morning Joe, as Joe Scarborough railed against the allegedly "stupid" arguments NRA leader Wayne LaPierre made on Fox News Sunday yesterday, Mika Brzezinski muttered "something Sarah Palin would say."  Consider that Palin had been in no way quoted, nor had her position on gun control been discussed.  This was nothing more than a gratuitious shot at Palin, obviously still a bogeyman for the MSM. H/t cobokat. View the video after the jump.

There clearly is no limit to what liberal media members are allowed to say about the National Rifle Association in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

Appearing on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show Sunday, Time's Joe Klein said the NRA "are acting like a bunch of crazies these days" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The indeceny of media attacks on gun rights advocates knows no bounds.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert said of the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre Wednesday, "You, sir, are f--ked in the head" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN media analyst Howard Kurtz was impressed last Sunday with how Meet the Press host David Gregory hammered the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre during their interview.

One week later, Kurtz wondered why Gregory "didn’t brandish any weapons or show much firepower" during this Sunday's interview with President Obama.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has relayed the latest turns of events in the David Gregory Meet the Press magazine brandishing incident (previous posts here, here, and here). The press is finally paying attention: "Now that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is on record that it told NBC News not to use the high capacity magazine in its segment with Wayne LaPierre, the big media is paying attention and taking this seriously."

Except that some in the press are, with anonymous sources, trying to excuse Gregory's and NBC's situation by saying that they somehow got permission to display the magazine. Uh, except that the New York Times says that any permission obtained doesn't matter. The permission supposedly came from the federal government's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF):

Two blog posts today should shred the credibility of Meet the Press's David Gregory in making arguments for gun control and against appropriate armed staff or security personnel at schools -- or they would, if journalists had the least bit of interest in exposing lawbreaking and hyprocritical behavior by their professional colleagues.

During the show, as reported at the Patriot Perspective, relaying a point first brought out by a member of the AR15.com forum site, Gregory "decided to wave around a 30-round AR-15 magazine" in direct violation of the District of Columbia "DC High Capacity Ammunition Magazines" statute. Given the Supreme Court's Heller ruling affirming that the right to keep and bear arms (and ammo) is an individual right, that law may not be enforceable, but it would also be interesting to know if Gregory's possession of an AR-15 magazine or his showing it on the air violated any of NBC's corporate policies. Additionally, the Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper pointed to Gregory's hypocrisy in mocking the NRA's Wayne LaPierre over his organization's advocacy of having armed guards in schools (internal link is in original; bolds are mine):

The hatred the media have for Wayne LaPierre knows no bounds.

Hours after the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association presented a strategy to protect America's students from the kind of massacre that happened in Newtown, Connecticut, a week ago, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell opened his program Friday by accusing the gun advocate of being "the lobbyist for mass murderers" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

The National Rifle Association and guns in general have taken a lot of media criticism in the wake of last weekend's murder-suicide involving Kansas City Chiefs football player Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre pushed back Thursday telling USA Today Sports, "The one thing missing in that equation is that woman owning a gun so she could have saved her life from that murderer."

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has joined the list of his colleagues deciding to disgustingly politicize the tragic Colorado shooting.  On Tuesday night, O’Donnell felt the need to attack Wayne LaPierre of the NRA and Republican Senator Ron Johnson (Wis.) for their support of the Second Amendment.

O'Donnell started off his "Rewrite" segment claiming LaPierre was a "blood-drenched lobbyist" who is a "defender of mass murderers’ right to use hundred-round ammo clips."  O’Donnell appeared shocked that Sen. Johnson believes a mass-murderer like James Holmes would still seek to obtain high-powered weapons regardless of stricter gun-control laws.  [Video followed page break;  MP3 audio here.]

While running through his usual litany of attacks on anti-Obama conservatives, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Tuesday included the National Rifle Association as part of the "crazy far-right" who "hate" Barack Obama.

Matthews began by wondering, "What is it about Obama that inspires this kind of weird, zealous hatred?" He later added, "Well, here's something, another strain of the crazy, far- right." After referencing birthers and other groups, the Hardball anchor played a clip of NRA President Wayne LaPierre deriding the President's stated support of the Second Amendment as a "big, fat lie."

On Monday's Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC, correspondent James Rosen filed a report describing the line of obstacles to acquiring a handgun legally in Washington, D.C., in spite of last year's Supreme Court ruling overturning the city's outright ban on handgun possession in the city. Host Baier introduced the report: "Correspondent James Rosen reports while it is now legal to get a handgun in the nation's capital, it is definitely not easy."

Rosen went through the steps of obtaining a gun during the report, and ended up playing a clip of NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre as he summed up the process. LaPierre: "What D.C. is doing is throwing up every obstacle, shackling the freedom to the point where it's no longer really a freedom."

Below is a compete transcript of the report from the Monday, October 5, Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC: