Country music superstar Eric Church ripped the NRA in a fake news rant about the Las Vegas massacre in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.
Church admitted the rant would result in backlash from fans, then said, “I don’t care.”
Rolling Stone reported that Church played at the Route 91 Harvest festival two nights before shots rang out during Jason Aldean’s October 1, 2017, performance. Ultimately, 58 people were killed and hundreds more injured by a man who had complied with every gun control law applicable in acquiring his firearms, including background checks.
Yet Church’s response to the shooting was to tear into the NRA while calling for more gun control.
The Grammy-nominated singer began by focusing on how many guns and how much ammunition Americans should be allowed to own:
I’m a Second Amendment guy. That’s in the Constitution, it’s people’s right, and I don’t believe it’s negotiable. But nobody should have that many guns and that much ammunition and we don’t know about it. Nobody should have 21 AKs and 10,000 rounds of ammunition and we don’t know who they are. Something’s gotta be done so that a person can’t have an armory and pin down a Las Vegas SWAT team for six minutes. That’s f*cked up.
Church did not mention that there were officers on scene of the shooting — on the 31st floor of Mandalay Bay — who chose to not go up one more floor and confront the gunman. Breitbart News reported that officer Cordell Hendrex chose to stay a floor below the gunman, where he listened to the gunfire without having to confront the shooter.
Hendrex and those with him were not pinned down by gunfire.
Church continued, “There are some things we can’t stop, like the disgruntled kid who takes his dad’s shotgun and walks into a high school. But we could have stopped the guy in Vegas.”
When asked why we failed to stop the Vegas shooter, Church replied, “I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA.”
Church emphasized he is not a member of the NRA, then said:
I’m a Second Amendment guy, but I feel like they’ve been a bit of a roadblock. I don’t care who you are – you shouldn’t have that kind of power over elected officials. To me it’s cut-and-dried: The gun-show [loophole] would not exist if it weren’t for the NRA, so at this point in time, if I was an NRA member, I would think I had more of a problem than the solution. I would question myself real hard about what I wanted to be in the next three, four, five years.
It should be pointed out that there is no such thing a “gun show loophole.” There has never been. The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791 and for centuries prior and centuries after Americans sold guns to their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members privately. Government had no involvement because the Second Amendment bars government from infringing the people’s right to keep and bear arms.
However, the Clinton administration put background checks for retail sales in place in 1998 and since that time, gun control activists have attempted to broaden background checks to include private sales and thus came the “gun show loophole” talking point. This focus completely bypasses the fact that the Vegas gunman did not buy his firearms at a gun show. Rather, he bought them at retail and passed background checks to acquire them.
Church told Rolling Stone he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and refused to vote for Donald Trump in 2016.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
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