Salon.com > David Keene

NRA is getting a new president

Thu, 02 May 2013 22:21:00 +0000

David Keene will be replaced by Alabama attorney Jim Porter as president of the NRA, once Keene's two-year term officially ends at this weekend's NRA convention in Houston.

CNN reports:

While Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre is widely known as the face of the NRA, Keene had an active role in publicity and media appearances, especially in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre that left 26 people dead.

Porter has been serving as the NRA's first vice president, and before that he served as the group's second vice president. The presidency, an unpaid position, is the next stop in the NRA's leadership rotation.

Anheuser-Busch heir resigns life-long NRA membership

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:07:00 +0000

The great-grandson of the Anheuser-Busch company renounced his membership in the National Rifle Association on Thursday, furious that the NRA helped defeat the Senate bill which would have expanded background checks in response to the tragedy in Newtown.

Adolphus Busch IV, in a letter to NRA president David Keene obtained by a St. Louis television station, wrote that "I fail to see how the NRA can disregard the overwhelming will of its members who see background checks as reasonable."

He said that the NRA seems to have become a lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers, rather than one for hunters and gun owners.

"One only has to ask why the NRA reversed its original position on background checks. Was it not the NRA position to support background checks when Mr. (Wayne) LaPierre himself stated in 1999 that NRA saw checks as 'reasonable'?"

McCain, NRA president: Assault weapons ban won’t pass Congress

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 16:50:00 +0000

Both Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and NRA president David Keene predicted that an assault weapons ban will not make it through Congress.

On CBS' "Face the Nation," McCian said that he doesn't think an assault weapons ban, like the one introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would pass, nor should it.

And appearing on CNN, Keene told Candy Crowley that he thinks legislation to ban assault weapons will fail: "I would say that the likelihood is that they are not going to be able to get an assault weapons ban through this Congress."

Keene added that he thinks Joe Biden did not seriously want to hear the NRA's proposals when they were invited to the White House. "We suspect that all he wanted to do was to say he talked to us, and now they're going to go forward and do the things they wanted to do."

NRA dismisses David Gregory’s “silly felony”

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:15:00 +0000

NRA president David Keene said that he does not believe David Gregory should be prosecuted for using a high-capacity magazine as a prop on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, or what Keene described as a "silly felony."

Keene, appearing on CNN, said that he thinks questions about whether or not Gregory broke the law for possessing the magazine, which is illegal in D.C., demonstrate the "craziness" of those gun laws.

"There are two lessons for him there," Keene said. "One, don't ask the government what's legal and what isn't legal because half the people you ask don't know. And secondly, that's a silly felony. It's a felony in Washington, D.C., to own that magazine or to be caught with a cartridge. So I really think what David Gregory did, while he was inadvertently flouting the law, was illustrated in a very graphic way, perhaps not intentionally, but in a graphic way just how silly some of these laws are."

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