Adding to his resume of bizarre interviews, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre this Monday continued his unwavering opposition to background checks for gun purchases while suggesting it could lead to government-mandated weapons confiscation.
In an interview on the Fox Business Network, LaPierre suggested that background checks would only hinder law abiding citizens from their right to own a firearm, saying that they have no effect in the “real world on stopping crime or keeping mental defectives from committing horrible acts.”
Entering into his usual conspiratorial-type thinking, LaPierre went on to say that background checks would be selectively enforced and abused.
“You’re creating a registry of all the law-abiding people in the country that own firearms,” he said. “I know the politicians say, ‘Hey, we’ll never use that list to confiscate.’ That’s a pretty darn tall order to believe a promise from people in this town right now.”
There is no evidence to suggest that LaPierre’s predictions of a government gun-grab are even remotely true.
Polls continually show that the public widely approves more stringent background checks for gun purchases. Fox News host Stuart Varney, who started the interview by expressing his support for background checks, asked LaPierre if he would be willing to support an expansion of the “instant check” system that’s currently in use.
“We supported it for dealers, but it’s never going to work for 100 million law-abiding gun owners that sell firearms, shotguns, rifles, hunters to hunters, farmers to farmers, relatives to relatives all the time,” LaPierre said. “Criminals will never go through that system.”
“The HIPAA laws, the privacy laws, the educational secrecy laws are so strong, they are never going to be on a list, they are never going to be recognizable, and they’ll never be in the system. Therefore, the only people that will be are people like you and me.”
Watch the Fox Business Network segment in the video below.
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