Recordings of calls between senior leaders of the National Rifle Association (NRA) reveal that the group considered a $1 million fund for victims of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado.
After the Columbine High School shooting left 13 people dead and more than 20 injured, NRA leaders on a 1999 conference call frantically discussed the future of their organization as they considered financial support for victims, NPR reported.
“At that same period where they’re going to be burying these children, we’re going to be having media … trying to run through the exhibit hall, looking at kids fondling firearms, which is going to be a horrible, horrible, horrible juxtaposition,” lobbyist Jim Baker said on the call, according to NPR.
The organization’s overall tone on the call was notably more sympathetic than the public stances it has taken in the recent era of regular mass shootings.
After a 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the organization said, “Many in legacy media love mass shootings.” After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the NRA said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” according to NPR.
“Everything we do here has a downside,” NRA official Kayne Robinson, who would later become president of the group, said in the 1999 meeting, per NPR.
“Is there something concrete that we can offer? Not because guns are responsible, but because we care about these people?” Robinson asked.
“Like a victims fund,” PR consultant Tony Makris responded.
Robinson then questioned if giving “the victims a million dollars or something like that” would “look bad,” to which Makris responded that providing money could symbolize that the organization felt “responsible.”
The gun group’s leaders also described some of their more activist members as “hillbillies” and “fruitcakes” and feared they would embarrass the NRA in the wake of Columbine.
When the group hosted a scaled-down version of its annual convention in Denver, not long after Columbine, protesters gathered outside as then-NRA President Charlton Heston conveyed a more defensive message.
“Why us? Because their story needs a villain. They want us to play the heavy in their drama of packaged grief, to provide riveting programming to run between commercials for cars and cat food,” Heston said, per NPR.
A current NRA spokesperson told NPR when asked for comment on the recordings that it was “disappointing that anyone would promote an editorial agenda against the NRA by using shadowy sources and ‘mystery tapes’ in order to conjure up the tragic events of over 20 years ago.”
The Hill has reached out to the NRA for comment.