The National Rifle Association (NRA) is never one to shy away from promoting gun ownership and the right to bear arms in the wake of a mass shooting, but the reaction by one of its board members to the Charleston, South Carolina shooting has sparked outrage.
Texas attorney Charles Cotton posted a message in an online forum blaming the one of the nine victims for Wednesday night’s massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church.
Church pastor and South Carolina state Sen. Clementa Pinckney was one of the three men and six women murdered during a Bible study session.
Cotton wrote Pinckney voting against a 2011 bill to allowing people to carry legally-owned concealed weapons at restaurants, daycares and churches.
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NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker told The Guardian Cotton did not speak for the entire organization.
The NRA has not spoken out or posted anything on its social media accounts about the Emanuel AME shooting. Baker told The Guardian the organization, which claims to have more than five million members, would not be commenting on the massacre “until the facts are known” and that now is not “the time for a political debate.”
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But those who are against gun control are engaging in political debate.
In the aftermath of the Emanuel AME shooting, President Barack Obama spoke out Thursday about the repeated gun-related tragedies in the United States.
“We don’t have all the facts, but once again innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama said, pointing to the Republican-controlled Congress having no appetite for stricter gun laws.
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That not only prompted a slew of online comments accusing Obama of leveraging the tragedy to promote gun control, it also gave fodder for some Republicans to say gun laws had nothing to do with the church shooting.
Former Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry told a right-wing news outlet drugs were more to blame, for what he called an “accident,” than guns.
“There are a lot of issues here that are underlying this that I think we as a country need to have a conversation about, rather than just the kneejerk reaction of saying, ‘Let’s take all the guns away,” Perry told Newsmax.
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