Representative Adam Kinzinger (R.,Ill.,) on Sunday blasted the National Rifle Association in the wake of several recent mass shootings, saying the group has “gone from defending the rights of gun owners” to becoming a “grifting scam.”
During an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Kinzinger described when he first fell out of favor with the NRA after having previously received an A-rating from the group.
He said he called for banning bump stocks after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that left 60 people dead, “and because of that the NRA basically said, ‘Kinzinger is a RINO’ or whatever their language was,” he said, “RINO” meaning “Republican in name only.”
“I realized especially then the only thing the NRA cares about is raising money on your back,” he said.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who once had an A-rating from the NRA, tells @jonkarl that the organization has “gone from defending rights of gun owners” to “a grifting scam.”
“The only thing the NRA cares about is raising money on your back.” https://t.co/u5VDjCkDR9 pic.twitter.com/DtYs5fc2x9
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 29, 2022
Kinzinger said the NRA is competing with the Gun Owners of America: “You think the NRA is crazy? Look at the Gun Owners of America. These are the ones that believe there should be zero restrictions on owning guns and now NRA has to compete with this group for crazy because that’s where they get their money from.”
“The NRA has become — it’s gone from defending rights of gun owners, it has become a grifting scam and all you have to do is look at the last few years of the grifting scam of the NRA to know that that’s true,” he added.
This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked Kinzinger during the interview how he went from “being somebody that was right in line with the gun lobby on this to somebody who thinks it’s time to change these laws?”
“It’s a journey of getting sick of seeing the mass shootings,” Kinzinger replied. “I’m a strong defender of the Second Amendment. And one of the things I believe — for some reason, it is a very rare thing — is that as a person that appreciates and who believes in the Second Amendment, we have to be the ones putting forward reasonable solutions to gun violence.”
“The right to keep and bear arms is important to Republicans. It is to me, too,” Kinzinger said. “But for some reason we’ve got locked in this position of ‘what are things where we can make a difference?'”
Days after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers when he opened fire in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Kinzinger said that “raising the age of gun purchase to 21 is a no-brainer.”
“If you look at the Parkland shooting, you look at Buffalo, you look at this shooting, these are people under the age of 21,” Kinzinger said. “We know that the human brain develops and matures a lot between the age of 18 and 21. We just raised — without really so much as a blink — the age of purchasing cigarettes federally to 21.”
The Uvalde shooter legally purchased two rifles in the days following his 18th birthday, the Houston Chronicle reported. One day after his 18th birthday, he purchased one of the rifles from a federally licensed gun store, which would have required a background check, according to the report. He purchased 375 rounds of ammunition one day later and a second rifle on May 20.
The 18-year-old suspect in another recent massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., that left 13 people dead had passed a background check before legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle from a gun store in Endicott, N.Y., which he then illegally modified to hold a larger magazine, according to the New York Times.