As Slate told you yesterday, the National Rifle Association has kept mighty quiet since Friday’s tragic school shooting in Newtown. NRA officials have repeatedly declined to comment publicly, and the gun lobby has gone radio dark on social media, letting its Twitter account go silent and, at least temporarily, unpublishing its Facebook account.
[Update at 4:45 p.m.: The NRA released its first official statement Friday afternoon. Read it here.]
But Politico’s Dylan Byers points us toward one place where the NRA has very much kept up with its anti-gun control talking points: NRA News, an online show owned and operated by the pro-gun organization, which has continued to broadcast since the shooting but gone mostly unnoticed until now.
Byers spent some time watching the NRA News shows, and explains what he saw:
The topic of the broadcasts has been the Newtown shooting, and hosts and guests alike have said directly that the shooting should not be blamed on guns.
On Friday, the day of the shooting, NRA News host Cam Edwards attributed the shooting not to the availability of guns but to an absence of love, an argument similar to the one made by former Gov. Mike Huckabee on Fox News that same day. “I don’t think the issue is an issue: I don’t think the issue is parenting, or Hollywood, or guns, or rap music, or young men…. It is the foundational stuff… whether it’s a lack of love, a lack of empathy for others, an apathy,” Edwards said.
On Monday, NRA News host Ginny Simone led her program with “the national debate about the need for tougher gun laws,” during which both she and her guest, National Review columnist John Fund, stuck to anti-gun control talking points.
You check out Byers full blog post here. Or head on over to NRA News and check out the programming for yourself.
Complete Coverage: Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
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