WASHINGTON — The president of the National Rifle Association says that the media are guilty of a huge double standard by ignoring news that a staffer at the left-wing Media Matters organization carried multiple weapons illegally in the District of Columbia.
In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas, NRA President David Keene said Tuesday that members of his group would be jailed and plastered across the front of The Washington Post if an NRA staffer were caught with an illegal weapon in Washington.
“The whole [Media Matters president] David Brock episode is symptomatic of the way people like him look at society. If I had a firearm, legal or illegal, he’d be horrified. But of course, his people are the good people. Just like the people in the government are the good people. So it’s OK to arm them, regardless of the laws,” said Keene. (RELATED: Media Matters provided illegal weapons to protect founder)
Keene insisted that the NRA comes under dramatically tougher scrutiny.
“We’ve seen this time and again. You know, if I were to raise my voice against one of these people, they would say I should apologize, I should do all this,” said Keene.
“You can go on the internet today and find a ‘Kill David Keene’ game where you get to shoot me and my head blows up. There’s not one politician who’s criticized that,” he went on.
“What if I did that to Mayor Bloomberg?” Keene wondered. “They’d demand that I be hauled off to jail.”
“If I did what David Gregory did and held up a magazine in the District of Columbia, I’d be in jail today,” he added, referring to an incident in which the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” illegally held up a high-capacity magazine as a prop during the Sunday show.
“If I did, or any of our people did what David Brock’s people did, we’d be in prison. And it remains to be seen whether he and his friends will be,” Keene said.
Keene went on to blame the press for playing favorites and deciding ahead of time to protect media-selected “good guys” from scrutiny.
“[T]hink about the press coverage. Think about the front page of The Washington Post if it was revealed that the president of the National Rifle Association or somebody with him was in the District of Columbia with an illegal firearm,” Keene hypothesized.
“That would be a banner headline in The Washington Post. But for these folks, it’s something we’re going to put under the rug because they’re the good guys.”
“They’re not the good guys,” Keene concluded. “They’re the people who think the world is designed just for them and that everyone else is a second-class citizen.”
Ginni Thomas contributed to this report.
