NRA hits new low taunting teen survivors on eve of March for Our Lives

In what can only be described as a desperate plea for attention, the NRA has released a new video that takes aim at survivors of the Parkland shooting, telling them that if their friends hadn’t died, “no one would know your names.”

The video, titled “A March for Their Lies,” was posted to NRA-TV’s YouTube channel just ahead of the student-led March for Our Lives event scheduled for Saturday in Washington, D.C.

In the clip, NRA-TV host Colion Noir lashed out at the teens who survived last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, mocking them for their youth and even taunting them about the deaths of their classmates.

Noir brought up the recent school shooting at Great Mills High School in Maryland, telling the Parkland survivors he wished an armed resource officer had been at their school “because your classmates would still be alive, and no one would know your names.”

“The media would have completely and utterly ignored your story,” Noir said, before falsely claiming that the media had not covered the school shooting in Maryland.

The NRA has obsessively touted the shooting at Great Mills High School, holding it up as an exemplar to “prove” that putting more “good guys with guns” in schools would prevent school shootings. In the incident, 17 year-old Austin Rollins shot and injured two fellow students and then died after exchanging gunfire with an armed resource officer — though it still has not been confirmed whether Rollins died from a self-inflicted wound or was shot by the resource officer.

But just hours after NRA-TV published the video, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey — one of the students injured in the Maryland school shooting — died from her injuries. The NRA has not yet publicly acknowledged Willey’s death.

Noir also failed to mention in the video that there actually was an armed police officer at Stoneman Douglas. Despite being trained for such situations, however, the officer did not try to confront the shooter.

Continuing his desperate attack on the teens, the NRA mouthpiece turned his attention to Saturday’s march, calling it “one-sided, logic-deprived, and intellectually dishonest” and dismissing the historic event as a “festival masquerading as a march.”

Noir went on to question the motives of the students participating in the march, accusing them of wanting to “burn the Constitution and rewrite the parts that you all like in crayon.”

Noir’s attack on the Parkland students is part of a broader social media blitz launched by the NRA ahead of Saturday’s march.

In a series of tweets and videos posted this week, the NRA and its propaganda arm NRA-TV have taken aim at the Parkland survivors, exploiting the hashtag used by student protesters and even tagging the teens by name in an apparent attempt to intimidate them.

While taunting teen shooting survivors about the deaths of their classmates may be a new low for the NRA, this is just the latest cry for help from the group, which has been thrust into a tailspin as they come to grips with a new reality.

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the NRA realized that its usual strategy of silence wasn’t working — so they decided to attack teenagers, instead. That strategy has backfired spectacularly, sending corporate sponsors fleeing and public opinion plummeting.

For the first time in nearly two decades, more Americans view the NRA negatively than positively. Meanwhile, support for common sense gun laws — like those the Parkland survivors are pushing for — just reached a 25-year high. 

And in the weeks since the Parkland shooting, lawmakers have advanced more gun control legislation than in the last decade, with Florida passing its first gun control bill in more than 20 years.

On the eve of March for Our Lives, which has been described as an event that could redefine politics for a new generation, the NRA is clearly having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the tides are turning. The Parkland teens bravely stood up and not only put a face to the scourge of gun violence, but to the future of gun violence prevention — and the NRA has no place in it.