NRA member blames Charleston victims for own deaths

A board member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful gun lobby in the world, has suggested that the victims of a mass shooting at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, “might be alive” if they had been carrying guns.

Board member Charles Cotton posted a comment online blaming Clementa Pinckney, the pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and a state senator, for his own death as well as those of his congregants in Wednesday’s rampage.

“Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead,” Cotton wrote on a Texas gun forum on Thursday. “Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

As a state legislator, Pinckney had voted against a law allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons in South Carolina.

The National Rifle Association has repeatedly blasted Congress for denying Americans the ability to protect themselves.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and CEO of the NRA, urged lawmakers earlier this year to pass legislation allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons across the United States.

"It's time for Congress to pass national right-to-carry reciprocity for the entire United States," LaPierre said February 27 during the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.

Lapierre made his case for more lax gun laws with added urgency following a mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school in December 2012. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said at the time.

Then he called on Congress to “put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

The Connecticut mass shooting - which killed 28 people, including 20 children - triggered a heated debate in the US about the need to reform the existing gun laws.

"I'll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can't accept events like this as routine," President Barack Obama said two days after the tragedy.

In 2014, a frustrated Obama slammed as "stunning" the inability of Congress to get behind a single piece of gun control legislation.

Though less visibly emotional, Obama renewed his call for gun control after the Charleston shooting.

"I don't need to be constrained about the emotions tragedies like this raise," he said on Thursday. "I've had to make comments like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times.”

“It is in our power to do something about it,” the president stated.

Addressing the annual US Conference of Mayors in San Francisco on Friday, Obama again touched on the issue of gun violence in America.

He said if Congress had reformed the nation’s gun laws “we might have some more Americans still here with us.”

“I am not resigned,” Obama said. “I refuse to pretend this is the new normal. I have faith we will eventually do the right thing.”

Dylann Roof, 21, who was captured Thursday in North Carolina following a massive manhunt, was charged Friday with murdering nine people inside the Charleston church.

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