Fox News host Megyn Kelly and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre went back and forth in an at-times tense interview Thursday afternoon, with Kelly asking LaPierre at one point to directly respond to families of victims of the elementary-school massacre in Newtown, Conn.
Before introducing LaPierre, Kelly played a clip of some Newtown families being interviewed by CBS anchor Scott Pelley in a clip set to air Sunday on "60 Minutes."
"It's powerful to listen to. Those families directly affected say if Adam Lanza, the shooter at Newtown, had not had 30-round magazines — if he had only had 10 rounds — more children would have lived," Kelly said. "Your thoughts?"
LaPierre didn't directly respond to her question, instead saying that Connecticut's sweeping new gun laws were a "problem" because criminals wouldn't follow them. LaPierre said that the NRA wants to address school safety with a plan to train and arm security guards at most schools in the nation.
Kelly continued to press LaPierre on the original point, though, saying it was "compelling" to hear families from Newtown say that if Lanza had had to reload five times instead of just once, more children might be alive today.
"My response is that the criminals aren't going to have less," LaPierre said. "One round in the hand of someone that's going to do horror is too many —"
"But how do you know, Wayne?" Kelly said, interjecting. "Adam Lanza — his mother was a legal gun owner — how do you know that his mother would not have obeyed the law, limited the magazine clip, and then Adam Lanza would've been limited to 10 rounds instead of 30."
LaPierre seemed caught off guard.
"Megyn, people that know guns know you can change magazine clips in a second," he said, stammering between sentences. "There's no evidence, you know, that anything would have changed."
He quickly moved onto a different argument, saying he thought gun owners needed high-capacity magazines for self-defense.
Watch the clip below, via Fox News:
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