National Rifle Association executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre on Thursday castigated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) for not following through on a promise to compile the mental-health records of individuals to use in background checks.
While addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, LaPierre played a clip of him speaking to Schumer on the CBS program "Face the Nation" in 1993.
"Are you in favor of computerizing the mental-health records of people into a national computer bank?" LaPierre asks Schumer in the clip.
"You bet, you bet I am!" Schumer responds.
"Well, can we join hands on that and go to Capitol Hill right now?" LaPierre asks.
"We can," Schumer says as he shakes LaPierre's hand.
LaPierre then blasted Schumer before the CPAC audience for not following through on his promise 25 years ago.
"Now, here's the real tragedy: Charles Schumer shook my hand to get all of the mental-health records into the system, and then he went back to Capitol Hill and you know what he did? Absolutely nothing," LaPierre said. "How many lives might have be saved if he had just kept his promise?"
LaPierre then predicted that in a year "many of those records may still not be in the system, not if some of these whining-for-television politicians and their media enablers have their way."
He said that the media and Democratic politicians will instead attack the NRA and push for stricter gun-control legislation.
"And when another monster slips through the cracks, the very cracks that they've enabled in the system, as the records of prohibited persons remain out of the database, it'll happen again," LaPierre added.
The NRA chief's comments came a week after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 people dead. The FBI said days after the shooting that it had received a tip that the suspected shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was armed and wanted to kill people, but failed to act on it.