NRA: Our members are the real victims of the Parkland shooting

One month after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch is throwing her organization a demented pity party.

On Monday, Loesch insisted that members of the radical gun group were the real victims of the mass shooting.

The gunman killed 17 students and teachers during the five-minute rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But Loesch sees NRA rank-and-file as casualties, too.

Appearing on NRATV, Loesch complained that policies from the Obama administration led to the shooting.

“Well, it cost people’s lives. And it also contributed to a state of poison in our national discourse where you have politicians and celebrities and everyone else impugning the characters of millions of law abiding members just because they choose to voluntarily enter into a fellowship and call themselves the NRA,” she said, according to a Media Matters report.

According to Loesch, “the problem” is that “it created even more victims of a different sort.” And she compared the fallen in Florida to NRA members because, she claims, they’ve had their character impugned.

Loesch has a long history of tasteless and offensive remarks. In 2012, she was suspended by CNN, where she then worked as a contributor, after she supported American troops who urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers.

And her latest ghoulish and heartless comments come as Americans increasingly rebuke the extremist NRA agenda. That backlash has led corporate partners to flee. And it’s prompted businesses to impose age limits on gun sales and stop sales of military-grade weapons.

And Loesch doesn’t even speak for most NRA members. In poll after poll, they support the kind of tighter gun restrictions that the radical group so vehemently opposes.

Loesch and the NRA are treating the massacre as some sort of culture war prop. And they’re continuing their relentless attacks on gun safety advocates while desperately trying to avoid blame.

And feeling sorry for one another has been a hallmark of conservatives in the wake of the Florida mass murder. Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade insisted “no one had it worse” than Loesch in the aftermath of the shooting because she faced a hostile crowd during a Florida town hall meeting.

Apparently, Loesch and Kilmeade are unclear as to the real victims of the Parkland massacre. The first-person account from Heather Sher, a radiologist at a hospital where some of the victims were taken, could help.

Sher was stunned by the damage inflicted by the AR-15, which the NRA wants to make sure teenagers can buy:

With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun-shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to the trauma center to receive our care.

Everybody with a conscience knows who the real victims in Florida were. And they weren’t Dana Loesch or her fellow gun enthusiasts.