NRA President David Keene appeared on CBS's Face The Nation to weigh in on the gun control debate. Unsurprisingly, he came out swinging against tighter laws on guns.
"We will continue to oppose a ban on semiautomatic weapons," he said. ""These aren't military weapons," Keene continued. "If we equipped our army with the AR-15, we'd be beaten by every Third World - you know, every Third World dictatorship in the country. Military weapons are fully automatic weapons, and that's illegal. You don't get those. That's not what we're talking about."
Host Bob Schieffer asked Keene if he thought NRA's policies were at least partially responsible for the recent gun violence.
"We don't think they have," he said. "We're living in a country, a free country, where people have a right to express their Second Amendment rights."
When Schieffer said that it's easier to get a gun in the United States than a driver's license, Keene responded, "There' s a difference between a driver's license, driving is a privilege, and owning a firearm, which is a constitutional right."
Keened also argued that you can't keep bad people from doing bad things, and the U.S. must look at greater societal issues rather than guns.
"I'm not saying that every mental patient is a potential killer. I'm not saying that everybody that watches a video is a potential killer. That's not true. But neither is, everybody who owns a gun is a potential killer," he said."The fact that something is misused, whether it's a baseball bat, or the mass killing in a Chinese school with an axe and a knife, doesn't mean that you ban baseball bats, axes and knives or guns."
The NRA made headlines on Friday after giving a much-derided press conference on the Newtown shooting. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called for more armed guards in schools and blamed the mental health system and video games for the increase in gun violence in the U.S.
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