“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy”

He added that the United States is now spending to train $2 billion police officers in Iraq and asked why federal funds could not be spent to train school guards to protect school in the United States.

“I know there’s a media machine in this country that wants to blame guns every time something happens,” he said, but he insisted that an armed guard might have been able to stop Adam Lanza, the killer in Connecticut.

LaPierre said, “We have no national database of these lunatics” and complained that de-institutionalization of the mentally ill had put too many dangerous people on the streets of America. “These monsters walk the streets,” LaPierre said.