Country star Eric Church blames the NRA for Las Vegas festival mass shooting: 'We could have stopped the guy'
- Country singer Eric Church discussed the October 2017 mass shooting that took place at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
- In the interview, Church, who was a headlining performer at the festival last year, placed blame on the National Riffle Association and gun lobbyists for being a "roadblock" to safety.
- "I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA," he said.
Country singer Eric Church was one of the headlining performers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last October, where a gunman opened fire on a crowd during the performance of headliner Jason Aldean and killed 59 people in the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Church discussed the Vegas shooting and placed blame on the National Rifle Association and gun lobbyists for being a "roadblock" to safety.
"There are some things we can't stop," he said. "Like the disgruntled kid who takes his dad's shotgun and walks into a high school. But we could have stopped the guy in Vegas."
He added: "I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA."
Church, who paid tribute to the victims of the shooting in a moving performance at the Grand Ole Opry in October, days after the shooting, told Rolling Stone that he is not a member of the NRA, but that he considers himself "a Second Amendment guy."
"I feel like they've been a bit of a roadblock," Church said of the NRA. "I don't care who you are - you shouldn't have that kind of power over elected officials. To me it's cut-and-dried: The gun-show [loophole] would not exist if it weren't for the NRA, so at this point in time, if I was an NRA member, I would think I had more of a problem than the solution. I would question myself real hard about what I wanted to be in the next three, four, five years."
Church performed two days before the shooting took place and was not at the festival when it occurred. He said that the shooting changed his perspective on guns "a little."
"As a gun guy, the number of rounds [the shooter] fired was un-f------believable to me," Church said. "I saw a video on YouTube from the police officer's vest cam, and it sounded like an army was up there. I don't think our forefathers ever thought the right to bear arms was that."
The NRA did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.