I won.
After months of debate, the Senate met yesterday and rejected a minor provision to expand background checks on firearm purchases, the last remaining piece of a proposed gun control package vigorously opposed by the National Rifle Association and myself. Now the bill is entirely dead, and I’ve won. I won, and those of you who are against me and what I stand for lost. Big time.
For those of you who are keeping score, it’s Wayne LaPierre: 1. Gun control proponents: 0.
I’ve succeeded in keeping Congress under my control, protecting the interests of my financial backers, and, most importantly, ensuring that deadly firearms remain abundantly available to anyone who wants them for the foreseeable future. So, once again, in case you were wondering who won and who lost this week, we—Wayne LaPierre, the NRA, and firearms industry—are the clear-cut victors. You—folks who think the Second Amendment is outdated, the families of various shooting victims, and the President of the United States—are the losers. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I absolutely fucking walloped you.
Now, I’ll admit, winning was very fun. It was fun for two reasons. 1) I got exactly what I wanted—every single little bit. Hell, even one measure that would have strengthened gun trafficking laws, for Christ’s sakes, died on the vine. And 2) winning means I got to watch other people lose—people I admittedly have no respect for and really enjoy watching get upset.
To the victor go the spoils, I suppose.
And not only that, the process of winning was fun. It was also pretty easy. Surprisingly so! All I had to do was make sure legislators knew that if they dared vote for any gun bill that might run contrary to the interests of the country’s weapons manufacturers, they would lose funding from the NRA, and we would make sure their pro-gun constituents would vote them out of office the next chance they got. It’s what I always do, and it’s been working for years, so I did it again, and it paid off, and I won.
God, it feels good to win. It just feels really, really good.
Now, even though you got absolutely annihilated here, I bet you actually thought you had a pretty good chance this time around. Four months ago, after 20 children were senselessly gunned down in the one place they should have been safe, you said to yourself, “Enough is enough. We’re going to get to work and make some serious changes to the gun laws in this country so that this kind of thing never happens again.” I could tell you all really wanted to win, but I knew you would lose.
The truth is, you never had a fucking chance. I had Congress in my back pocket the entire time, and so when that big gun control proposal reared its ugly head, we gradually chipped away at it, snipping away provisions for an assault rifle ban and restrictions on high-capacity magazines until all that was left was the idea of expanding background checks to keep military-grade killing implements from falling into the hands of criminals and the mentally unhinged, a relatively innocuous measure supported by 90 percent of Americans.
And, because I was winning by such a large margin at that point and was on my way to a blowout victory, even that tiny little provision didn’t stand a chance at being passed into law. In fact, it couldn’t even clear a minor procedural hurdle. Hell, legislators from both sides of the aisle came together yesterday and crushed it right out of the gate, making me, and the groups that finance me, very, very happy.
Take a look at this face. This is the face of a winner. If that makes you angry, look in the mirror because that’s the face of a loser. A huge, unequivocal loser.
I bet you’re not ready to give up, though. I bet you’re still willing to get out there and lose all over again. Maybe you think you can pressure your elected officials to follow their consciences and actually listen to their constituents instead of immediately bowing to special interest groups that don’t give a shit about the thousands of people who die every year in acts of gun violence. Maybe you think you can rally the majority behind a common cause and effect some real change in Washington that makes us all safer so that the people of this country don’t have to live in constant fear.
You can’t. I certainly invite you to try—because I enjoy winning—but trust me, nothing you do is going to change anything. What’s going to happen is I’m going to keep on winning, and you’re going to keep on losing. That’s just how it’s going to be from here on out. Because that’s how it’s always been.
I won. You lost. Bye.
