President Trump infuriated liberals by hosting the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre at the White House’s December 14 Christmas party.
December 14 was the fifth anniversary of the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, and gun controllers who still use that attack to call for more Second Amendment restrictions were outraged.
Yahoo News! quoted Nicole Hockley, whose son was killed in the Sandy Hook attack:
December 14th marked five years since my six-year-old son, Dylan, was murdered in his first grade classroom alongside 19 of his classmates and 6 educators. Not only did [Trump] ignore the 5-year remembrance completely — not even a single tweet — he slapped us all in the face by having none other than NRA President Wayne LaPierre at his White House Christmas party that night. The appalling lack of humanity and decency has not gone unnoticed.
What Yahoo News! did not point out is that Hockley is the founder of the gun control group Sandy Hook Promise. This is the group for which country singer and former President Barack Obama supporter Tim McGraw held a fundraiser in 2015. It is the same gun control group for whom singer Sheryl Crow released a gun control anthem this year.
During the past two years, Sandy Hook Promise has supported a gun confiscation bill in Oregon and a federal expansion of background checks, neither of which would have prevented the Sandy Hook attack. Moreover, the group unsuccessfully opposed a concealed carry bill for law-abiding citizens in Georgia.
Hockley is upset that President Trump hosted LaPierre at the White House because LaPierre’s response to Sandy Hook is not a call for more gun control, but a call for good guys with guns guarding schools to keep children safe. After all, Sandy Hook was a gun-free zone, and that allowed the attacker to have more than nine minutes without facing any armed response. Nine minutes are an eternity if the bad guy is the only person in the building holding a gun.
During a White House press briefing on the day of the Christmas party, press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked if there were any gun controls the administration would support in light of attacks like the one at Sandy Hook or the October 1, 2017, attack in Las Vegas. She said, “I don’t think there’s any one thing that you could do that could have prevented either one of those. If you could name a single thing that would have prevented both of these, I’d love to hear it because I don’t know what that would look like.”
Sanders is correct. The expanded background checks Sandy Hook Promise supports would not have stopped the Sandy Hook attacker because he stole his guns. He did not walk into a store and buy them. Moreover, the expanded checks would not have stopped the Las Vegas attacker because he passed background checks for his firearms. Gun control proved impotent once more.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, 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.