SALT LAKE CITY – The executive director for Alliance for a Better Utah released a statement Friday in response to a press conference from the National Rifle Association that called for an end to bans on guns in schools.
Wayne LaPierre, executive director for the NRA, spoke Friday, expressing grief for the lives lost in last week’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. He says no-weapons policies at schools put children’s lives at risk.
Policies banning guns at schools create a place that “insane killers” consider “the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk,” LaPierre said.
Such policies leave schoolchildren “utterly defenseless, and the monsters and the predators of the world know it,” he said.
Maryann Martindale, executive director of the Alliance for a Better Utah, released a statement Friday in response to the NRA’s claims.
“Keep the NRA out of our schools.
“Qualified professionals in public safety are better equipped to make plans to protect our children, not the gun-selling, gun-toting National Rifle Association that is more interested in making sure its clients maintain good market share than whether or not our children are safe and protected. The NRA not only has a hold on our national leaders, but has strangled progress in our own state legislature.
“The Salt Lake Tribune singled out state representative Curt Oda in their masthead editorial today as harboring a particularly ludicrous approach to reducing gun violence, but Oda’s ideas are widespread in the state legislature. Many of our state legislators are more loyal to their guns and the NRA than their own constituents, preventing them from dispassionately approaching the problem of gun violence.
“Whatever steps we take over the next couple of weeks, this much should remain true: Keep the NRA out of our schools.”
The Alliance for a Better Utah is an education and advocacy organization that provides resources, commentary and action on important public policy issues.
