“It was cowardly, utterly cowardly that [the National Rifle Association] wouldn’t show up for” last Thursday’s CNN town hall meeting on guns with President Obama, Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple told CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” The NRA complained that it would have been allowed only one pre-screened question, but Wemple notes that “people who oppose President Obama’s gun agenda were able to stand up there right in front of him and press their points with the president. What more could you ask for?” Wemple added, “I don’t know … how can you ask for a better forum than that if you want to criticize President Obama on gun restrictions. Instead …the NRA took to Twitter, which is a cowardly move.”
CNN political commentator S.E. Cupp disagreed, saying that, “The NRA has no incentive to sit in a town hall and be lectured to by a president who thinks they are the problem and by extension, the law-abiding gun owners that the NRA represents, are the problem … Why would any member or representative of the NRA think they can have an honest and open conversation about these issues when they are repeatedly told they are the problem? That makes no sense.” Cupp said, “The media writ large has not been friendly to the gun issue. A newspaper just after [the mass shooting in Newtown, Ct.] published the names and addresses of law abiding gun owners, as if we are the problem. The media has been overtly hostile on this issue. It’s also been overtly and deeply disappointingly unknowledgeable. I have never seen an issue be covered by so many ocal people who know so little about guns.”