Education

Rhode Island professor demands NRA leader’s ‘head on a stick’ after Sandy Hook

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An assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island unleashed a flurry of profanity-ridden tweets demanding death for National Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre.

The professor, Erik Loomis, called for LaPierre’s “head on a stick,” reports Campus Reform. He also said that anyone who pays dues or gives money to the NRA is “contributing to a terrorist organization.”

“Fuck the NRA,” Loomis added in another tweet.

As College Insurrection notes, Loomis said that the senseless killing of 20 children and six teachers by lone gunman Adam Lanza has made him as angry as he was “the day we invaded Iraq” — possibly even angrier.

Loomis also used his Twitter account to argue that gun-control advocates should seize the Sandy Hook shooting as an opportunity to pass legislation limiting gun ownership.

“You are goddamn right we should politicize this tragedy,” Loomis tweeted, according to Campus Reform.

According to Twitchy, Loomis also retweeted a rant by The Rude Pundit saying, “First fucker to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death.”

Loomis later insisted his calls for LaPierre’s murder shouldn’t be taken literally.

“Dear right-wing morons, saying you ‘want someone’s head on a stick’ is a metaphor,” wrote Loomis, according to College Insurrection. “I know metaphor is hard for you to understand.”

However, as Jim Treacher and Twitchy report, Loomis sang a much different tune in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. At that time, he suggested that conservatives and the tea party movement in particular were wrong to use violent rhetoric.

“The whole Tea Party movement loses here because a lot of Americans are flinching in the face of the violent rhetoric that propelled them to power,” Loomis wrote after Jared Loughner allegedly shot Giffords outside a Safeway grocery store in Casas Adobes, Arizona.

Loomis singled out Sarah Palin for censure.

“She’s the one who had a target over Giffords’ district,” he wrote then. “Her aide claiming that it was actually surveyor symbols just insulted our intelligence.”

In November, Twitchy reports, Loomis also retweeted this missive: “Let’s hunt down Dick Morris like a pig and skin him for breakfast.”

Concerning recent tweets about LaPierre, Loomis later suggested that the NRA chief perhaps shouldn’t be beheaded, but merely put “in prison for the rest of his life.”

After that, Loomis began to see himself as something of a martyr for the gun-control cause.

“The right-wing intimidation campaign against me for saying the NRA was a terrorist organization continues. Will not succeed,” Loomis tweeted, reports College Insurrection.

Loomis’s Twitter account — @erikloomis — appears to have disappeared after 1,456 posts, according to Topsy.com. While the account was in existence, Loomis called himself a “habitual ranter” and asked readers to “forgive bizarre tweets.”

On the blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, Loomis has penned an elaborate defense of his tweeting.

“I want to make it blindingly clear that I did not call for the assassination of Wayne LaPierre,” he wrote. “In my world, calling for someone’s head on a stick is a metaphor to hold them responsible for their actions.”

The University of Rhode Island has released a statement saying that Loomis does not speak for URI, and that the school “does not condone acts or threats of violence.”

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Eric Owens