Gun-rights advocates stare down control calls

NRA is conducting its biggest show since April in K.C.

The Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Gun-rights advocates gathering Friday for a collector's show said no amount of gun control could have stopped Mark Barton from the massacre in Atlanta.

"It was a madman," Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of National Rifle Association, said at the association-sponsored show. "If you try to confiscate all the guns from the good people, the crazies and the criminals will still find a way to get 'em."

Barton, an investor, fatally shot nine people at two brokerage firms on Thursday after killing his wife and two children earlier in the week. The office victims were shot with 9 mm and .45-caliber handguns before Barton committed suicide. One of his guns was legally registered; authorities are unsure of the other.

The killings came one day before the NRA -- working with a local gun collectors group -- opened a three-day show in Kansas City devoted to rare and antique firearms.

More than 350 merchants spread thousands of guns and wartime memorabilia across their tables. Buyers filled out identification forms, which merchants fed over the telephone to the "Insta-Check" background check system. Some transactions took only minutes.

Gun control advocates called for the NRA to cancel the show, citing the Atlanta killings and labeling the Kansas City show the NRA's biggest since the Littleton, Colo., shootings that left 15 dead.

After those shootings at Columbine High School, the NRA scaled back its annual convention in Denver in late April and canceled its gun show there.

"These shows are an attempt to make respectable a point of view that is finding less and less favor among Americans," said Naomi Paiss, a spokeswoman for Handgun Control Inc., in Washington. "Every unnecessary massacre makes people more and more aware that this country is paying for some people's love affair with guns."

Few among Friday's visitors to the convention were willing to even talk about gun control, though formal discussions on gun rights were planned for today, with a seminar and update from the NRA's legislative arm.

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