Watch: GOP busted for parroting NRA talking points after taking cash

Top recipients of NRA money used a rare congressional hearing on gun violence to repeat almost word-for-word the extremist organization’s talking points opposing any new regulations on guns.

The sad display was brilliantly captured in a video released by Guns Down America, an organization trying to reduce gun violence.

Watch as members of a key Congressional committee echo the NRA's talking points on gun violence time and time again. pic.twitter.com/Aa8nwlzmNO

— Guns Down America (@GunsDownAmerica) February 11, 2019

The video, with footage from a recent hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, shows Republican members of Congress parroting the NRA and its spokespeople — and notes just how much cash each of those members has received from the NRA.

“It’s the criminals that don’t follow the laws,” said Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), making the common NRA argument against gun laws. For its $3,000 investment in her, the NRA got Lesko to sound just like former NRA chairman Wayne LaPierre, who claimed “criminals won’t participate” if gun laws are passed.

After taking $5,893 from the NRA, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) was all too happy to urge his fellow lawmakers “to focus on enforcing the laws we already have on the books” on guns.

This talking point has been invoked again and again by the NRA, and NRA spokesperson and serial liar Dana Loesch has said the same thing almost verbatim.

“You have to enforce the laws that we have,” Loesch says in a clip featured in the Guns Down America video.

People like Loesch and Reschenthaler say this even though the public has repeatedly called for new gun legislation after mass shootings, and even though U.S. states with stricter gun laws also tend to have fewer gun deaths.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), one of the few California Republicans left in Congress, has taken in a massive amount of money from the NRA: $54,842.

At the hearing, he whined: “Whenever anyone suggests armed guards to protect our children at our schools, it’s met with hoots of derision.”

The foolish idea that putting more guns around children will help stop school shootings has been a favorite of the NRA’s. And it was one of the ideas Trump touted most often after the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida.

Like McClintock, Trump was the beneficiary of tainted NRA money, receiving $35 million in support from them in 2016.

Congress ignored the gun issue while it was under GOP control, even as American citizens were repeatedly gunned down at school, in church, and at concerts. Then the NRA lost big with its bet on Republicans in 2018.

Despite that rebuke from voters, the video shows that even in the minority, Republicans are still marching in lockstep with the NRA and its tainted money. They will continue to offer the same dishonest talking points even if it means more Americans of all ages could be murdered.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.