The National Rifle Association continued its silence Sunday after one of its most prominent board members, Ted Nugent, called a group of politically-active survivors of a mass shooting “mushy-brained” and “soulless” two days earlier.
“These poor children, I’m afraid to say this, but the evidence is irrefutable, they have no soul,” Nugent told the conservative radio host Joe Pags on Friday, part of a long tirade against a group of survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in February who have gone on to advocate for gun control legislation.
TPM’s multiple requests for comment to the NRA went unanswered Sunday. The LA Times reported Saturday that a similar request to a representative for Nugent went unanswered as well. NRA spokespeople didn’t mention Nugent’s comments in segments posted to the group’s video channel, NRATV.
“All you have to do now is not only feel sorry for the liars, but you have to go against them and pray to God that the lies can be crushed and the liars can be silenced so that real measures can be put into place to actually save children’s lives,” Nugent said separately in the same interview Friday.
In a Facebook Live video Saturday flagged by Media Matters, Nugent stood by his comments:
Nugent, like many pro-gun advocates, said after a gunman shot up a Republican congressional baseball team practice in June of last year that he was “not going to engage in that kind of hateful rhetoric anymore,” as CNN noted Sunday.
That would be a big step for the 69-year-old rock star: Nugent visited the White House last year despite saying during the 2012 campaign season that “[i]f Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” That was one of several menacing comments referencing the then-President. Nugent also told Obama to “suck on my machine gun.”
A survivor of the Valentine’s Day shooting, Kyra Parrow, noted the dissonance Saturday:
it’s funny how the NRA argues that guns aren’t the issue, it’s bullying that is. Yet literally a NRA board member is being a 5 year old acting like a bully to me and all of the students at douglas. https://t.co/9Upcqdr8e4
— Kyra Parrow (@longlivekcx) March 31, 2018
