NRA CEO Says Politicians Who Don’t Like Guns Should Go to Bed Afraid

The NRA’s top executive, Wayne LaPierre, kicked off the organization’s annual convention Friday by threatening pro–gun control politicians.

The National Rifle Association convention is taking place this weekend in Indianapolis, on the anniversary of one of the deadliest mass shootings in the city’s history and on the heels of two major mass shootings in the last month.

“Gun-hating politicians should never go to bed unafraid of what this association and all of our millions of members can do to their political careers,” LaPierre told the crowd, to cheers.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1646941951625666577

LaPierre’s chilling threat shows just how much influence the gun lobby has in politics. No Republicans have challenged his remark so far. Meanwhile, every Republican running or rumored to be running for president is speaking at the convention.

Elsewhere in the country, Republicans seem fully in thrall to gun rights (meaning, unfettered access to firearms). One of the most recent mass shootings was in Nashville, when a shooter killed three children and three adults at a private Christian grade school. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee initially hedged on increasing gun control, but he pulled an about-face earlier this week after thousands of protesters marched to the state Capitol to demand new legislation. Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton indicated his party was willing to work toward “bipartisan solutions.”

But on Thursday, House Republicans shot down a “red flag” bill that would prevent future shootings like the one at the Covenant School.

The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily paused lower court rulings that restricted access to the abortion pill mifepristone, which would have dealt a major blow to national abortion access had it gone into effect.

A Texas federal judge ruled last week that mifepristone, one of the medications used to induce an abortion, had been improperly approved by the Food and Drug Administration and should be yanked from the U.S. market. The Department of Justice appealed the decision, but the Fifth Circuit Court only partially stayed the ruling while it considers the full appeal suit. Meanwhile, dueling rulings on the pill made it tricky for the FDA to figure out what exactly it should do next.

The Supreme Court decided to stay the Texas ruling until April 19, meaning mifepristone’s status remains unchanged—for less than a week. Economist reporter Steven Mazie, who covers the Supreme Court, pointed out that this is purely an administrative stay to give the court time to consider the appeal.

Both the Department of Justice and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone, had appealed the Fifth Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court. Both received identical responses about the administrative stay. Danco argued that the partial stay would “irreparably injure” its business because it would have to change its drug labels, recertify providers, and get approval for a supplemental new drug application, all processes that could take months.

Danco also pointed out that it could not comply with both the Fifth Circuit ruling and the dueling injunction out of Washington ordering that mifepristone access remain unchanged. The company argued that if the Supreme Court weren’t willing to completely stay the Texas ruling, then the high court should hear the entire case now and make a final decision.

A bigger issue at play, though, is that non-elected judges who do not have medical backgrounds are making decisions about medication. As Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple University’s law school, previously told The New Republic, “The question for appellate courts is not just about abortion but about deference to a federal agency’s expertise.”

The Texas ruling “undermined” the FDA’s authority, she said. “To take seriously that it ignored risks, risks unsupported by any credible evidence, suggests questions as to what federal courts might decide about other federal agencies’ decisions.”

Nebraska Republican R. Brad von Gillern says that more kids are becoming violent, performing poorly in school, and committing suicide because social media is pressuring them to become transgender.

During a hearing on Legislative Bill 574, which would ban gender-affirming care for people under 18, von Gillern argued that the bill “does nothing to promote hatred or bigotry,” but rather just protects “children from making childish decisions.”

Von Gillern went on to argue that children make decisions “based upon the worst criteria: peer pressure, lack of information, emotions, popularity, and today more than ever, social media pressure.” But instead of showing any concern for children’s decision-making or autonomy, the Nebraska Republican proceeded to blame acceptance of trans people for many of the problems facing the next generation.

The Republican cited three things he was certain about as a child: that there was a God who loved him; that his parents loved him; and that he was a boy who would someday grow up to be a man. He contrasts his own certainty with what he says is a contemporary time in which “many kids don’t have the security of knowing any of those three things.”

“Nearly all [kids] are being told that the one thing they knew about themselves the most, that they are a boy or a girl, might be a mistake,” von Gillern said. (Nearly all kids are not, in fact, being told that their gender identity is a mistake.)

He continued. “Is it any wonder that the teen suicide rate has skyrocketed? Is there any question about why kids are reacting with violence against one another? Is it shocking that school behavior and performance is declining?”

To von Gillern, the answer was simple. “When you remove all of the securities from a child, you shouldn’t be surprised when they act and react poorly,” he said.

“The opponents of 574 say that the suicide rate in kids is up because gender affirmation is being withheld from them,” von Gillern continued, giving a nod toward research that has repeatedly shown that this is indeed the case. Nevertheless, von Gillern, ever the expert on gender identity and children’s sociology, had his own conclusion. “I postulate that the suicide rate is increased because their lives have been filled with question marks rather than affirmation of who they truly are, and who they were created to be.”

The Nebraska Republican’s style of essentially denying the existence of a wide body of work on these issues (let alone denying the existence of actual trans people) is not new. In an earlier debate on the bill, von Gillern compared gender-affirming care to shock treatments, lobotomies, and forced sterilizations.

Aside from von Gillern’s outright dismissal of rigorous work concerned with children’s well-being, his comments embody a more basic deficiency. To say that practically all children are becoming not just more violent or poorly performing in school, but indeed more suicidal, because of efforts to affirm someone’s gender identity is stunning. It’s either a willful or an unintelligent display of narrow thinking.

Our youth do in fact face a troubling slate of challenges: growing up at a time when school-shooting drills are as routine as assemblies; when their libraries and books and teachers are being attacked; when, indeed, phones and social media are placing so much pressure on them. But to instead focus your energy on making the lives of already marginalized children even more difficult is a level of dishonesty that serves no child, regardless of their gender identity.

Donald Trump’s team has clearly identified Ron DeSantis as the biggest challenger for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and they are going after the governor hard.

The Make America Great Again, Inc., PAC released an ad Friday attacking a few of DeSantis’s policies but mainly highlighting a month-old report that the governor once ate pudding with his fingers.

“Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong, and we’re not just talking about pudding,” the ad narrator said.

The Daily Beast reported in March that DeSantis used his fingers to eat chocolate pudding while on a plane trip in 2019.

“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “always like a starving animal who has never eaten before … getting shit everywhere.”

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert—by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

DeSantis has denied the story, which has big salad-comb vibes.

But Team Trump seized on the story anyway, and the ad—while deeply weird and unsettling to watch—admittedly does an excellent job of undermining DeSantis’s self-styled persona as a right-wing, “anti-woke” warrior.

The ad comes the day after members of Trump’s inner circle tore into DeSantis for going on a book tour as parts of his state struggle with record rainfall and major flooding. Fort Lauderdale, in southern Florida, got about 26 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. A meteorologist for the National Weather Service described the rainfall as a “1-in-1,000 year event, or greater.” But the mayor of Fort Lauderdale said Thursday that DeSantis had yet to contact him.

“Fort Lauderdale is under water and DeSantis is campaigning in Ohio right now instead of taking care of the people suffering in his state,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted.

Far-right activist and Islamophobe Laura Loomer, whom the Trump campaign is reportedly considering hiring, tweeted, “Instead of doing his job, today @GovRonDeSantis is flying to Ohio to campaign for President.”

The ad has already aired on Fox News, CNN, and Newsmax.

DeSantis has yet to formally announce that he is running for president, although he is widely expected to. Trump has previously attacked DeSantis, nicknaming him “Ron DeSanctimonious’’ and “Meatball Ron.” Now that the attacks are ramping up, it’s clear that he and his team view DeSantis as Trump’s biggest threat.

On Thursday, Tennessee Republicans had their first opportunity to show Democrats, Tennesseans, and the country their willingness to work together to enact baseline gun safety reform.

And they refused to.

Democrats had filed a “red flag” bill in the wake of the Nashville shooting that could have prevented the shooting in the first place. Tennessee Republicans had shut down a similar bill two years ago. But yet again, House Republicans blocked the bill, voting it down in committee on Thursday. (Tennessee’s supermajority of Republicans means that every committee vote largely reflects their own will.)

Earlier this week, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee suggested he would support reforms like a red flag law—perhaps buoyed in part by his personally losing two friends in the Nashville school shooting. But it seems even that is not enough for him to flex any political will on his fellow Republicans.

Republicans’ rejection of the opportunity came after the Nashville school shooting that left three children and three adults dead, after the ensuing protests that brought thousands of people onto the streets, and after Republicans were exposed nationwide for their deeper corruption after expelling two Black Democratic representatives (who have since been reinstated) for standing with the protesters.

“The question is who has the ball; at some point, somebody has to take ownership for this being successful,” Senate Minority Leader Jeff Yarbro told local affiliate WKRN. “If we are not going to see leadership in the House or the Senate or the governor sort of stand up and say, ‘I am not just encouraging this as a good idea, but I am going to put my political capital on the line to get it done,’ then we are not going to see it get done.”

Republicans, for their part, just seem uninterested. It appears their energy is dwindling after being placed under new scrutiny for their brazen campaign to expel Democrats Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson after the trio interrupted House proceedings to protest inaction on gun violence, in solidarity with the thousands of Tennesseans who had been protesting right outside the Capitol building.

After Republicans successfully expelled Jones and Pearson, thousands continued protesting, while revelations of the Republicans’ corruption came to the forefront. They have wielded their supermajority to make up their own rules and kill bills at a moment’s notice on no coherent basis. While expelling Jones and Pearson for breaches of “decorum,” they have not expelled members committing far worse, severe violations, like child molestation, or a member allegedly assaulting Jones amid the protests. And now, reporting has shown that House Speaker Cameron Sexton has lied about his place of residence and taken advantage of taxpayer-funded travel allowances, in violation of the state Constitution.

“They are taking on a lot of water, and they want to get out of here as soon as possible, and it’s damage of their own making,” Democratic Representative John Ray Clemmons told WKRN.