Eric Church will release his sixth studio album, Desperate Man in October, but he has been getting more publicity about his recent remarks to Rolling Stone where he blames the NRA for the deadly shootings at the Rt. 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last October.
Church was one of the performers at the country music event that took the lives of at least 59 people when a gunman opened fire on the crowd from a nearby hotel. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Church, who said he considers himself a “Second Amendment guy,” blamed the NRA and gun lobbyists for being a “roadblock” to gun safety in a new interview.
“There are some things we can’t stop,” Church told Rolling Stone. “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.”
But he added, “I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is 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,” Church argued. “I would question myself real hard about what I wanted to be in the next three, four, five years.”
Church performed two nights before the shooting and though he wasn’t at the festival when the shootings occurred, he stated that it has definitely changed his views on gun ownership.
“As a gun guy, the number of rounds [the shooter] fired was unf—ing 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.”
