“W
E HAD TO CHANGE the
subject,” said David
Keene, as if making
an obvious, unobjectionable point.
We were sitting at the back
table of his favorite Italian restaurant. Keene, the 67-year-old
president of the National Rifle Association, exuded a satisfied calm.
His thick white hair was combed
in Jack Kennedy fashion. He wore
horn-rimmed glasses and a red Vneck sweater with his sports coat
and tie, and he spoke in a soothing
baritone. He looked and sounded
like a college professor.
But what he said wasn’t academic — or obvious and unobjectionable. In fact, his statement
might have struck many American
voters as cynical, politically cutthroat and even outrageous.
For I had asked him whether
he or the NRA regretted its first
responses to the mass murder of
children by a killer with an assault
weapon at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
The answer was “no.”
Not long after the December
2012 shooting, Wayne LaPierre,
executive vice president of the
NRA, had said that the only way
to prevent more Sandy Hooks
was to place armed guards in every school. The NRA had posted
a web ad calling President Barack
Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because Secret Service agents are
posted outside his daughters’
KEENE’S PRESENCE IN THE
NRA INNER CIRCLE IS A MEASURE
OF HOW DIVISIVE AND POLITICAL
THE GUN DEBATE IS TODAY.
school. More recently, the NRA
has pushed its case via robocalls
throughout Connecticut, including Newtown, ostensibly to fight a
tide of new gun control measures
pending in the state Legislature.
Keene told me that the NRA had
no regrets or second thoughts and
that gun control advocates had
seized on the Newtown tragedy to
pursue their own unconstitutional