NBC host David Gregory on Sunday asked National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre how many guns would be enough after the lobbyist called for more armed guards in response to last week's shooting at the Washington Navy Yard -- just as he had done after last year's Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.
"The NRA is calling for today layers of security around our military bases," LaPierre said during an interview on Meet the Press. "And the other thing we need to take a look at is all these brave men and women that are trained in firearms that are signed up to serve in the military, they are largely disarmed on our military bases. We need to look at letting the men and women that know firearms and are trained in them do what they do best, which is protect and survive."
Gregory pointed out that after the slaughter of 20 elementary school children in Connecticut last December, LaPierre had said that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
"This was the Navy Yard, there were armed guards there," Gregory noted. "Does that not undermine your argument?"
"No!" LaPierre replied. "The whole country knows the problem is there weren’t enough good guys with guns! When the good guys with guns got there, it stopped."
"Can it be the sliding scale, where you do have armed guards there, but now there’s not enough armed guards?" Gregory wondered. "And when it comes to schools, if only we had an armed guard, and then if we had teachers with weapons then we could stop it?"
"I mean, where does it stop?" the NBC host asked.
"How can anybody look at what happen this week and say there was enough security there?" LaPierre insisted.
Later in the interview, Gregory posed a question from a victim of a shooting at Virginia Tech, who did not understand why the NRA did not support background checks for private guns sales.
"That's what wrong this this town," LaPierre declared. "Here we have a military base completely unprotected, we have a mental system that's completely broken down, they're trafficking in 13-year-old girls down the street, there's all kinds of drugs, all kinds of guns."
"And the priority of this town is, 'Hey, do you think a hunter, if he sell a gun to a hunter in Kansas ought to have to have to be under the thumb of the federal government?'" he added.
