Quinn: NRA Plan To Avoid Mass-Shootings Is 'Stupid, Asinine'
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn slammed the National Rifle Association's suggestion on how to prevent further school shootings.
As WCBS 880's Rich Lamb reported, Quinn -- an anticipated mayoral candidate -- was livid over the suggestion by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre calling for an armed police officer or security guard in every school in the country, and she did not hold back in describing the organization's statement.
"Some of the most stupid, asinine, insensitive, ridiculous comments I have ever heard in the public arena" was how Quinn described LaPierre's remarks as she raised her voice in discussing them.
WCBS 880's Rich Lamb reports
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Added Quinn, "I don't understand with all those little coffins being rolled out in Newtown, how they can believe the answer is more guns."
LaPierre made the remarks Friday in response to the massacre in Newtown, Conn., a week earlier that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
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"I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate what ever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation and to do it now," he said. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
He said many active and retired police officers, military members and security professionals could be deployed as armed security in school.
Officials of the pro-gun lobby, which for years has stopped congressional gun control measures cold, blamed the national propensity for violence -- the Tucsons, the Auroras and the Newtown tragedy on the appetite for violent video games and music videos that venerate gun play and murder.
"Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks the filthiest form of pornography?" LaPierre said.
In the late 1990s, scholar John Lott argued in two books that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons reduces crime, and argued that the prospect of confronting an armed would-be victim made criminals less likely to attack – a position that many gun rights advocates adopted. But Lott tweeted on Friday that LaPierre's plan would not work.
"Identifiable guards are of very limited use in these cases. They will be the first person killed," he tweeted. "Costly and not effective."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the nation's staunchest gun control advocates, on Friday called the NRA's words "a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country."
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said he was disappointed.
"I don't think that's necessarily what the world was expecting from the NRA. I thought they were going to make some meaningful recommendations as to how to strengthen gun control," Kelly said.
On Wednesday, Obama tapped Vice President Joe Biden to lead an informal task force on gun violence and set a January deadline for the recommendations.
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