Wayne LaPierre

No takers for Wayne LaPierre's wacky armed guards plan

In a rather obvious misdirection maneuver NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre responded to the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut by proposing a new nationwide program for armed guards at all schools. Details on how to pay for the program were not disclosed though the term volunteers was used.

But what was presumably considered a slam dunk inside the NRA brain trust is not going over well on either side of the aisle. Even Republicans seem skeptical of LaPierre’s proposal, from The Hill:

Retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) wouldn’t get behind a federal push to put police in schools.

“I certainly think that at the local level, they should make this decision, because that is going to be accepted in some places and not accepted in some places,” she said Sunday on CBS…

GOP Rep. Tim Scott (S.C.), who will replace Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) in the upper chamber in January, also expressed caution over Congress’s next steps, calling both the NRA and Democratic responses “premature.”

Lapierre also referenced Israel as a model for his proposal in his Meet The Press interview. Unfortunately for Wayne and the NRA, Israel sees it differently:

Yigal Palmor, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said the situation  in Israel was “fundamentally different” from that in the United States.

“We didn’t have a series of school shootings, and they had nothing to do with  the issue at hand in the United States. We had to deal with terrorism,” said  Palmor.

“What removed the danger was not the armed guards but an overall anti-terror  policy and anti-terror operations which brought street terrorism down to nearly  zero over a number of years,” he said. “It would be better not to drag Israel  into what is an internal American discussion,” he added.

This proposal is running out of gas fast. Hopefully the NRA will have better luck with a Plan B than Speaker Boehner.

Photo by Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons license