Wayne LaPierre: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I’ll tell you, it’s great to have Joe Gregory, a true American patriot up here. I thank you for the introduction and for being here today. Also I want to thank all of you for being here. You know, every time I come to CPAC, I see the excitement in the faces of young men and women out there, and it takes me back to when I first came to this town. You know, I came here to Washington DC because I wanted to make a difference, like you. And since then, while more than six administrations and more politicians than you can count have come and gone, I’ve been asked over and over and over again the same question. They ask me Wayne, how did you ever survive in this town? The Second Amendment is stronger than ever. How did the NRA do it? Millions of Americans have seen their rights restored, with Right to Carry in 48 states. Castle d-yeah, I know. You’ve all helped us pass a lot of those bills. Castle Doctrine in 24 states and, and, and Right to Carry Reciprocity sweeping across the land. I mean just how did the NRA do it? How did the NRA defeat so called assault weapons bans, ballistic finger printing, waiting periods, gun registration, gun owner licensing and two generation’s worth of anti-gun schemes from anti-gun schemers? How has the NRA gained the trust and the support of the American people while becoming the most feared and respected brand of freedom in America? What’s the secret of NRA’s success, they ask. And I think the answers to all those questions can be summed up in three simple words. Truth and justice.

Let me tell you what I mean by that. The NRA has refused to tell the American people anything but the truth. In big cases and in small ones, we’ve demanded justice and fairness for all Americans. Truth and justice are the reasons why some of us are still here in this town, while countless others have come and gone like the tides on the Potomac. Americans throughout this whole country, they know the truth. They instinctively sense what’s right; and they instinctively sense what’s wrong. And they sense what’s just. When politicians respect those principals, Americans reward them. And they reward them with their votes and their support. But when politicians abandon them, Americans run them out of this town on a rail. You’ve seen it happen before. Now I’m not here today to talk about deficits or defense, carbon credits, bank bailouts or terrorist trials or Obama care. But I will say this. Politicians in Washington today could do more good for this country and their careers if they would stop the damn lying. Stop telling us things that simply are not true. Here’s what I mean. Last March everybody from the White House to Congress to the press started saying that Mexican drug lords were arming themselves with guns from the United States. Remember that?

You know I have to tell you, when I heard that, those same sound bytes being repeated over and over and over again, my B.S. detector bounced off the wall. It really did. It really did. I’m sure yours did too. So I sent the NRA news crew down to the Mexican border. Here’s the truth.

Look. Ladies and gentlemen, the White House simply wasn’t telling the truth on this issue. So I went on Face the Nation to warn the American people that that 90 percent number was about 100 percent B.S. You know, people used to look at politicians, and it was kind of like some Jay Leno kind of joke. You’d sort of shrug and you’d say well, you know those politicians. We never really expected them to tell the truth anyway. But now, it’s not just cynical what’s going on; it’s sinister. It’s a combination of political dishonest to serve an agenda, and media dishonesty to serve an agenda. They’re linking together; they’re feeding off each other; and they’re having a destructive effect on our entire system of governance in the United States. Here’s what happens to powerful politicians when they don’t tell the truth. Bill Clinton – he found out the hard way. So did a lot of other politicians who paid the price for his dishonesty. First it was waiting periods. Then it was the so called assault weapons ban. Well, Mr. Clinton’s crime bill was a crime, especially for his party. The American people – they didn’t want his bans. They saw them for the fraud that they were. So they kicked his party out of Congress, pulling the plug on 40 years of Democratic control. They sent the first House Speaker packing since the Civil War. You know, I remember meeting with Tom Foley and meeting with Jack Brooks, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. I told them don’t let Bill Clinton talk you into this ban. What he’s saying about these guns isn’t true and the lying is going to beat you guys. And they said well, he’s our president, Wayne. We gotta do what he wants. So they left the truth behind and they walked out on that rickety old plank. And on election day, the voters came and cut off that plank with a chain saw. You remember you, you were there. Even Bill Clinton admitted the NRA was the reason the republican controlled the house yet four years later with Monica making headlines Clinton ran back to gun control like a gullible exgirlfriend. He did you remember, this is history, you lived it, the country did. But then the truth leaked out. Even while he demanded more and more gun laws Clinton’s justice department was refusing to enforce the laws they already had. Here’s what our former president Charleton Heston had to say.

 Well I gotta tell you Bill Clinton liked that about as much as a deposition. So he tried to change the subject and demonize his critics and frighten the American people by attacking the big bad NRA. Yeah, but while he squinted and scowled and wagged his finger people were dying as a direct result of his refusal to prosecute federal gun crimes and the NRA had had enough. You know after that interview people in this town told me I was over the top. They came up to me and told me I’d gone too far. You can’t take on the president they said even if it is true. That following Sunday, Tim Russert tried to make me back down on Meet the Press but the truth was the truth. Denying it was killing people and somebody needed to say so.

We were all on the side of truth and justice. The truth was enforcement worked. Yet the Clinton administration they ridiculed the program. In fact Clinton’s then deputy attorney general, now the attorney general Eric Halder, he was in the national media calling the Richmond program a cookie cutter approach. I mean the shameful truth was that while he could have been saving lives Clinton pushed more phony gun bans, built on the lie that criminals ever obey any law. And if you think that’s all ancient history I’m gonna tell you it’s still going on today. When Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendelle tried it on Face the Nation I called him out on it just recently.

You know blaming honest gun owners for crime may not have consequences for criminals but it does for politicians who buy into that lie. Let’s talk about one right now. Clinton convinced Al Gore to walk out on that rotting plank of gun control in the 2000 elections and on election day Al Gore learned the hard way just how inconvenient the truth could be. Even Bill Clinton admitted that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

And keep in mind and I say it over and over and over again when he talks about NRA all NRA is is people all over this country one by one that stand up for truth and justice. We’ve talked about the truth now, now let’s talk about the justice part. You know, when the authorities can’t protect you they’ve got no business and no authority trying to deny you the right to protect yourself. It’s, it’s it’s not right, it’s not just, but it’s exactly what they did down in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. If you wanna see injustice on a catastrophic scale look at what happened in New Orleans.

That whole nightmare down in New Orleans brought more than a million new members on the NRA’s rolls. We fought to get their guns back and we won a law in Louisiana along with similar laws in 27 other states and a federal law to top it all off to ensure Americans that they never again had their rights wrenched away by arrogant authorities in times of crisis and that’s the law of the land as we sit here today. But we also fight injustice anywhere we find it. Just as a 17-year-old Gary Todesco of Willow, California. Like so many of his friends and classmates Gary liked to go hunting before he went to school. It helps put food on his family’s table. But to big city elitists people like Gary’s family are fodder for ridicule. If you’re in the elite the whole idea of hunting to eat is somehow just beneath ya. It’s not something you do and so other people shouldn’t do it either. That’s the way they think. Well one day Gary went hunting before school but when the school found out that he’d been out hunting that day they brought Gary in to question him. And when he told them the truth they turned his life upside down. Not because he broke any law but because the elitists wanted to single him out and make him an example. Watch this.

Even though Gary Todesco didn’t do anything wrong the authorities went after him misusing their power, ignoring the truth and they turned justice into a joke. That’s the kind of elitist arrogance we’re up against today as we sit here. It’s the same kind of arrogance you see from elitists like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg or New York Senator Charles Schumer who say, who say freedom is okay for us but it’s not okay for you. They’re more than happy, they have armed protection for themselves but if you’re a member of, if you’re not a member of their elite you need not apply for that same freedom. So when Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC seemed to buy off on that kind of injustice in the name of ideology I was glad to tell her the truth about right to carry in this country.

You know laws that deny the right to self-defense violate America’s sense of justice. They’re not right, they’re not fair, they’re not just but they could get you killed. The U.S. Supreme Court as much has said so. When it ruled two years ago that the right to self defense in the home is fundamental to the Second Amendment but their ruling applied only to federal enclaves like Washington, D.C. So other cities ignored the ruling, denying their citizens the same freedom that the Supreme Court restored to the citizens of Washington, D.C. That’s why next month the NRA will argue before the Supreme Court for incorporation for the second amendment of the second amendment against infringement by cities and states. All Americans must have free unfettered and full access to that freedom wherever they live period in this country. Or fairness will be a fiction and justice simply won’t exist. Ladies and gentlemen we live in a time of change. Today as we stand here in Washington and watch this young administration with powerful majorities on Capitol Hill and an election looming that’s likely to be revolutionary, our leaders would be wise to review the history we’ve discussed here today. Whether it’s the distortions of the Obama White House regarding Mexico’s drug war or the dishonesty of the Clinton Whitehouse regarding crime or the truths they failed to tell or the injustices they are willing to flict, inflict upon us, every one of these political failures should cause the air raid warning sirens to go off in every office in this town. They need, they need to understand that the decisions they make will have profound and permanent consequences on our country but also on their careers. A decade ago, Peter Jennings wrapped up the momentous 2000 elections with an interesting analysis of the NRA’s role.

Let me leave you with this. Ladies and gentlemen, the rules are tell the truth. The rules, the rules are demand justice. Stand with the American people because they know those rules. They live by those rules and they demand that their leaders respect those rules. I believed that when I came to this town. I’ve lived it for the past 33 years and I’m standing to tell you and them defending truth and demanding justice isn’t just politically the safest thing to do, in the end it’s the right thing to do because truth, because truth and justice inevitably, eventually, and invariably will always prevail. Thanks for inviting me here today and every day every one of you always defend freedom. Thank you very much.

 

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