LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — In 2008 and then again in 2012, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre claimed that if Barack Obama were elected president, he would confiscate everyone’s guns.
That hasn’t happened — firearm possession actually increased during Obama’s tenure, thanks in large part to the NRA’s marketing and legislative agenda. But that didn’t stop the group’s leadership from lobbing the same attack at Hillary Clinton during its annual meeting in Louisville on Friday.
“If she could, Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine, run an entire national security industry right into the ground, and put your name on a government registration list,” LaPierre said. “If she gets her hands on the Supreme Court and stacks it with just one more justice, every total gun ban she dreams, every confiscation scheme that she craves, would stand up in her court and we’ll all be kissing our Second Amendment freedom goodbye.”
“You can kiss your guns goodbye,” he continued during his remarks to roughly 80,000 NRA members.
Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine, run an entire national security industry right into the ground
After claiming that Clinton would destroy the Second Amendment and take everyone’s guns away from them, LaPierre and chief lobbyist Chris W. Cox made a series of sexist and disparaging comments against the presumptive Democratic nominee.
At one point, Cox called Clinton a “horse” and then played a video clip of her barking. The same, out-of-context clip has also been used in a Trump campaign video. “I’m sorry about that. That was the wrong clip,” he said to laughter from NRA members. The next video he played showed Clinton calling the Supreme Court “wrong” on the Second Amendment.
“The next president chooses the fifth justice, so the Second Amendment is on the ballot this November,” he said, referring to how the decision in the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding an individual’s right to carry was 5–4, before Antonin Scalia’s death.
Cox also made a joke about Clinton’s personal life and marriage. But the attacks are nothing new for NRA leaders. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America, told ThinkProgress that it’s something the group shares with Donald Trump.
“Both the NRA and Donald Trump have a long history of misogyny and making misogynistic remarks and implying that her personal life has anything to do with the Second Amendment,” she said. “It just gets nasty and it gets needlessly personal.”
Personal attacks may be the only way the NRA thinks it can win the 2016, which it has said will be an essential time for their Second Amendment rights.
“If we don’t show up to the polls in force this November, we will witness the end of individual freedom in this country,” Cox said. “That’s not hyperbole. It’s the truth.”