Anti-gun protests rock NRA convention — Analysis

Anti-gun protesters picketed the NRA’s annual convention in Houston, Texas, on Friday, demanding the government ban so-called ‘assault weapons.’ Despite the convention coming three days after a shooter killed 19 children and two adults in a Texas elementary school, speakers and attendees at the convention insisted that they wouldn’t surrender the right to bear arms.

Two days after shooting and killing 21 children at Uvalde Elementary School, Texas on Tuesday, a teenager gunman was killed by an agent of the Border Patrol. The National Rifle Association (NRA), a 280-mile (450 km) distant, began its annual convention in Houston on Friday.

The anti-gun group criticism of the event is always strong. Several hundred protesters attended. Protesters held signs accusing NRA officials of possessing “Blood on [its] Hands,”They chant and heckled the attendees “shame”At those who entered the gun lobby assembly. A group of children stood silently protesting across the street with images and names of the victims of Uvalde hanging around their necks.

One group carried a coffin sized for children around the convention centre.

Protests attracted some well-known names in liberal politics. School shooting survivor-turned-activist David HoggThe convention was attended by hundreds of demonstrators who announced that they would be holding a number of anti-gun protest marches next month. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, rejected Republican arguments that teachers should be armed to prevent school shootings.

“More guns = more violence”She spoke to Reuters. “Assault weapons should be banned.”

‘Assault weapons’ is a controversial term. The gun industry claims it means fully-automatic firearms that have been prohibited in almost all cases since 1986. However, the anti-gun lobby uses this term to refer to long rifles that look like military guns, such as semi-automatic AR-15. Such weapons were banned by the administration of former President Bill Clinton in 1994, but that ban expired in 2004, and an attempt in 2013 during Barack Obama’s presidency to reinstate it failed. 

Handguns are the most common weapon used in gun crime cases in America. They don’t include rifles like the AR-15. Most of these guns were illegally owned.

Since Joe Biden took office last year, he has placed regulations on certain pistol grips and cracked down on the sale of untraceable ‘ghost guns,’ but has not pushed Congress to enact a sweeping ban on any kind of firearm.

The slaughter in Uvalde, the US’ deadliest school shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, has reinvigorated a nationwide debate on gun laws, with politicians, entertainers, and even sports franchisesRequirement that the Second Amendment is revoked

However, speakers at the NRA’s convention were adamant that banning guns isn’t the answer. The former President Donald Trump condemns the “deeply evil, violent and mentally disturbed young men”Who have done it? “a contagion of school shootings”Since 1999’s Columbine High School massacre. Ted Cruz (Texas Senator) blamed the shootings. “broken families, absent fathers, declining church attendance,”Video games that are violent “chronic isolation.”