Emotion is the tool of the other side. The people who will continue to write their congressmen and senators are those like us who pay attention and are interested in the facts. The only reason that gun control is even registering in the public consciousness right now is because the media was able to whip people into an emotional frenzy by parading dead children across the TV screen. While distasteful, such sensationalism does succeed in getting people's attention. Watching pundits debate talking points and sound bytes is boring to most people and, if it goes on long enough, they'll stop watching.
The Republicans are in no worse position now than they were when the Virginia Tech shooting happened in 2007. Back then, they had an unpopular Republican President who had promised to re-instate the AWB if it reached his desk and was, for all intents and purposes, a lame duck. Also, the Democrats controlled both houses of congress at the time and would do so for another three years and we did not yet have the Heller or McDonald rulings. The primary difference between then and now was that because the Virginia Tech victims were adults rather than children, the media wasn't able to create the emotional frenzy than they have this time. The sooner we can get them to stop parading the victims across the TV, the poorer the chances for new gun control become.
Again, anything short of a show of force and resolve on the part of the NRA will be characterized as weakness and evidence of guilt. The other side has shown no interest in being conciliatory and if we try to play it safe out of fear that we might offend someone, we will wind up letting the other side dominate the conversation. Look, you have to get past this notion that the other side is composed entirely of well-intentioned, albeit misguided, people who just want to fix the problem, they're not.
This is politics at its dirtiest: taking advantage of the murder of children to push a political agenda. Short of simply giving up and conceding defeat, there is nothing LaPierre could have said that wouldn't have been criticized by the media. Here is the choice he was faced with: either stick to the principles and offer a solution other than gun control to which the media wil cry "the NRA is being belligerent, they won't even consider gun control" or try to be conciliatory and compromise or say nothing at all in which case the media would howl "see, see, they've got blood on their hands and they know it!" While neither option is ideal, at least with the first you don't allow the other side to dominate the conversation.
Actually, I saw Gregory as the one trying to do that. Gregory wanted to dismiss the idea of armed security using "well there was a cop at Columbine" as an excuse while ignoring that police procedures were very different then than they are now. When LaPierre pointed out the differences in police procedures, Gregory quickly dismissed him and changed the subject. What you don't seem to be grasping here is that LaPierre is characterized as a "gun nut" because that's what the media wants to characterize him as. They don't want to talk about mental health care reform or school security because those aren't parts of the agenda, but gun control is.
As I said before, being a tough interviewer and being a hostile interviewer are not necessarily the same thing. For example, if Gregory had been tough, yet impartial, he might have asked a question like this: "How would you respond to critics that say armed school security is not a workable solution because there was an armed police officer on campus who failed to stop the Columbine shooting?" That's a tough question, but by simply asking it and then allowing LaPierre to respond and explain his position, Gregory could have remained impartial. Instead, Gregory chose to cut LaPierre off, talk over him, and change the subject before LaPierre had a chance to fully explain his position. You say that LaPierre wasn't prepared, but I say that he was as prepared as he could have been. LaPierre had all of his facts straight and was able to counter all of Gregory's arguments when given the chance to do so. The problem was, Gregory wasn't interested in hearing what LaPierre had to say once he realized that LaPierre wasn't going to be goaded into a "gotcha" moment.
It was the media, not the public, that created the emotional frenzy. When the media is trying to parade the victims across the screen and putting the anti-gun pundits all over the TV withing hours of the incident before the facts are even known, you cannot tell me that they don't have an agenda. It's not as though there isn't other, equally important news that could be reported on, yet they keep harping on this.
The problem is, now matter how impractical or ridiculous a 400 round magazine may be, throwing them that bone is basically an admission that guns are part of the problem, they aren't. Rather than try to appease the unappeasable gun banners by throwing some of our own under the bus, we need to redirect the conversation to mental health and school security as LaPierre is trying to do.
LaPierre tried to point out that an AWB has already been tried and that it didn't work, but Gregory continually cut him off and didn't let him finish. Like I said, the problem wasn't that LaPierre wasn't prepared, it was that Gregory didn't want to hear what he had to say.