was only on it for 5/10 of a second. so right there, it shows you that might be one of the reasons you don't get burned when you walk across hot coals, is you're not touching the coals for very long. >> so the trick for walking through fire is basically don't worry very much and walk through it very, very quickly. like, get out of the fire. now, i'm not trying to take anything away from the people who have walked through tony robbins' fire and feel like their lives have changed. but i am trying to say it may have more to do with physics than your inner awesomeness or your personal super power to have a better life, which are great, but not connected to the soles of your feet or the coals beneath them as it turns out. and one more time, do not try this coal walking thing at home. that does it for us tonight. now it is time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell". once again, an american massacred as many people as possible for, among other reasons, to get attention. and he got the attention he

wanted. but he won't be getting it from me. >> there was a brief suspension of politics, but no more. >> both campaigns are back in full swing. >> mitt romney, back on the campaign trail. the president back on the campaign trail. >> we know that mitt romney is going on a big foreign trip overseas. >> mitt's going abroad, right? >> setting off this week on his first foreign trip. >> how's that going to go? >> mitt romney's focusing on three countries. >> he starts in london, he starts in the olympics. >> but then he's going on to israel and poland. >> israel and poland have very conservative governments. >> i was a severely conservative republican governor. >> he is afraid of offending the right-wing base of the republican party. >> do i believe supreme court should overturn roe v. wade? yes. i believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. do i believe that supreme court should overturn roe v. wade? yes. since roe v. wade has been the long for 20 years, we should sustain and support it. i'm not precisely sure of what i

said, but i stand by what i said. >> meanwhile, david axelrod wasted in time getting back on the offensive, tweeting, tax returns, bundlers, bain. >> massachusetts records and now key documents from the olympics. >> when it comes to secrecy, mitt takes the gold. >> his campaign knows that they're going to have to really fight hard. >> president obama is pushing his foreign policy record at the vfw convention in reno. >> in you i see the same shining values, the virtues that make america great. >> now, ting the lines of attack are definitely being revived. >> well, if you don't run chris christie, romney will be the nominee and we'll lose. today, the campaigns returned to criticizing the opponents and mitt romney returned to having bad days on the campaign trail. tonight, mitt romney went after president obama on cnbc. >> it's a very strange and in

some respects, foreign to the american experience type of philosophy. if you have a business and you started it, you did build it. and you deserve credit for that. it was not built for you by government. >> yeah, you built it. just like jack gilchrist. remember jack gilchrist? he's the owner of gilchrist metal fabricating company and starred in a romney campaign ad. >> my hands didn't build this company? through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. >> today we learn that jack gilchrist's business, like so many other american businesses, was built in part with government help. in 1999, gilchrist metal received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds issued by the new hampshire business finance authority. gilchrist also said his company received a u.s. small business administration loan totaling somewhere south of $500,000 in the late 1980s.

he said his business has also received matching funds from the new england trade adjustment assistance center, which is federally funded. a new report out today reveals even more secrecy surrounding the romney candidacy. mitt romney likes to remind voters that he presided over the 2002 olympic games, some time before the 2012 election, the university of utah will release records from those games. but, unfortunately, those records will not be complete. some of the documents that may have shed the most light on romney's stewardship of the games were likely destroyed by salt lake olympic officials. abc news has learned the archivists involved in preparing the documents for public review told abc news that financial documents, contracts, appointment calendars, e-mails, and correspondence are likely not included in the 1,100 boxes

of olympic records and will not be part of the collection that will ultimately be made public. obama campaign strategist david axelrod tweeted in response, "tax returnsbundlers, bain, massachusetts records, and now key docs from olympics. when it comes to secrecy, mitt takes the gold!" tonight, mitt romney defended his olympic record that no one will be able to fully vet. >> i'm afraid what's primarily come from the president's campaign has been a series of attacks on me for my private sector work, by the way, for which i'm very proud. recently, the olympics, which i'm also very proud of. and of course, my leadership in massachusetts. and i think i was able to, by virtue of having a great team, able to achieve some wonderful things there as well. >> today the obama campaign released a new full minute television ad that will run in nine swing states.

>> over the next four months, you have a choice to make. it's a choice between two very different plans for our country. governor romney's plan would cut taxes for the folks at the very top, roll back regulations on big banks. but you know what? we tried that top-down approach. it's what caused the mess in the first place. i believe the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class, asking the wealthy to pay a little more, so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way. sometimes politics can seem very small, but the choice you face, it couldn't be bigger. >> joining me now, our co-host of msnbc's "the cycle," krystal ball and steve kornacki. let's listen to what president obama said on friday with rush limbaugh's reaction to it today. >> i'm sure that many of you who are parents here had the same reaction that i did when i heard this news.

my daughters go to the movies. what if malia and sasha had been at the theater. as so many of our kids do every day. >> this is an egomaniac, who really thinks that the people of this country think he is more important than any other human being alive in this country. and then i say, can he only relate to this through his own flesh and blood? why does he have to turn everything of noteworthy consequence in this country around and so that it's about him? >> of course, the president didn't only relate to it through sasha and malia, but krystal, let me explain something to you about rush. he's in what is now about his 40th year of absolutely perfect birth control. he has practiced perfect birth

control. and he does not have a child. so he does not realize that every parent in america had, among other reactions, exactly the same reaction that the president just described. >> well, and i can speak for myself. i have a young daughter, and that was the way that i related to it. i mean, how dare the president personalize this and speak to it as a husband and a father. but rush is feeding this group of people in the country a relatively small group, but a large group within the republican party, who have to find every single thing that the president says or does deeply troubling, insulting, and generally awful. and he plays that role of finding everything the president does awful and insulting, very well. but in terms of the national dialogue, if you look at the country as a whole, people in general really like this president. so limbaugh's out on a limb here. i mean, there's a new gallup poll that shows by a 2 to 1 margin, people find the president to be more likable

than mitt romney. so when he's playing to this small group, he's energizing the base, but certainly not winning over any new converts. >> steve kornacki, mitt romney was just on kudlow on cnbc, and he made a statement about the second amendment. in fact, let's listen to it and we'll react to it afterwards. >> i still believe that the second amendment is the right course to preserve and defend and don't believe that new laws are going to make a difference in this type of tragedy. >> steve, that sounds to me like the line he's going to use to coast through this. and my sense is is, the media and the political media will just let this mass murder slide, just like they let all the others slide, and there won't be any real political pressure surrounding it in terms of gun or ammunition control. >> i think you're right. i think romney probably will be able to slide in that. but i think if we're going to be honest about it, we'd have to say part of the reason is there's not going to be any pressure from his opponent on the subject.

b barack obama is really not anymore interested in having a debate and having a discussion about gun control. and that's really consistent with the lesson the democratic party has drawn from the last ten years. i think a strong case can be made, they've drawn the wrong lesson. but what democrats decided in the wake of the 2000 election with al gore and president bush, democrats said we lost in 2000 because we lost states like west virginia, where blue-collar, rural white populations turned on us because we're the party of gun control, so we're not going to talk about that anymore. and in 2004 when john kerry ran literally a week or so before the election, he went on a goose hunt in ohio trying to appeal to those same voters and saying, look, i'm not al gore. john kerry didn't have anymore luck with those blue-collar voters than al gore did and barack obama hasn't had anymore luck with them either. the case can be made that you're being treated as the gun control party, maybe you should act like it, but there's still no indication that the president wants to do that. >> and lawrence, steve and i were having this conversation

earlier. an interesting thing here is, is if you ask americans about an assault weapons ban, about limits on the number of guns you can purchase, there is some support for those positions. but the problem is the nra takes all of those things and bundles them up and send out these neat little postcards right before election day saying, this candidate is supporting the second amendment and this one is not. and it's not broken down into the individual components. so someone like my dad, who is a huge second amendment supporter and really takes what the nra has to say seriously, even he would be supportive of some of these gun control measures that are reasonable, but when it comes down to it, there's this, you're either with us or against us mentality that doesn't look at the nuance. and that's what democrats are fighting against. that and the fact that, i think on the left, there are people who care about gun control, but it's not as much of an animating issue as it is for people on the right. >> i want to get to these olympic records, because i, for

one, had my heart set on getting a big pile of olympic records and e-mails, so that i could look through there and see what e-mails were in there about maybe, you know, having some bain meetings or bain phone calls that conference calls that romney had to participate in. i would love to see who got contracts there with the olympics, that profited from it through romney's good offices. steve kornacki, i'm not going to get those records. it's going to be just like the state, the governors' records in massachusetts. >> you're shocked. >> i think there's some fox somewhere that's got all the massachusetts stuff, that's got all the olympic stuff. >> the tax records. >> my conspiracy theory has been, you know, what you might get during the olympics is a little bit more in the way of tax information. they might wait until the olympics to put something more out. i was thinking that a week ago, but i think the case has sort of been made, that romney's sort of strategy on this is to run out the clock as much as you can,

wait until the media gets distracted, waits until the political world gets distracted by something else. and i'm feeling a little more now than i was a week ago that he might be able to pull that off. >> krystal ball and steve kornacki, thank you both for joining me tonight. >> thanks, lawrence. coming up, mitt versus mitt. now, i know that you know that mitt romney has changed his position on abortion, but you might not know how much he's changed it and how often he's changed it and what he looks like when he's changing it. we will show you a short video of mitt romney in every turn in his abortion road over the years. that's coming up. and tonight, we welcome "the new york times" to our off the cliff campaign. "the times" has editorialized in favor of going off the cliff. and charles blow will join me later to discuss the latest chapter in the seemingly never-ending story of mass murder in america. while some fiber ads use super models,

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a few of your ideas for our off the cliff campaign button. this is from marco roka of philadelphia. nick levy from wood cliff lake new jersey sent this one via e-mail. and this one was submitted by cody white from denver. and anton key of birmingham, alabama, submitted this one via twitter. keep them coming. our off the cliff segment is next. and later, mitt romney's long and very twisted road on abortion. [ male announcer ] while many automakers are just beginning to dabble with the idea of hybrid technology...

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♪ in tonight's episode of "off the cliff," we welcome "the new york times" to the "last word's" "off the cliff" campaign. on friday, "the times'" lead editorial cheered on senator patty murray, known here as senator thelma, for her idea of letting all of the bush tax cuts expire on schedule, on new year's eve, and letting automatic spending cuts go into effect on new year's day, thereby forcing republicans into a reasonable negotiation over tax and spending policy. here's that "times" editorial right here. we put a little "off the cliff" campaign button on it, right there. "the times" editorial recognized

that this would make grover norquist and his anti-tax pledge irrelevant to the process. by letting all of the tax cuts expire on schedule, "the times" said republicans can then join democrats in restoring the cutc, only for income up to $250,000. no vote need be taken on raising taxes for the rich. and thus, republicans won't have to remove their no-tax increase straight jacket, so says "the new york times." then on sunday, bill keller, the former editor of the "new york times," stepped up with an op-ed entitled, "head for the cliff," pointing out that the new year's eve fiscal cliff gives president obama leverage with republicans that he has never had before. here's bill keller's op-ed piece, "head for the cliff," right there. can we see that? and in it, bill keller said, if no deal emerges, all the

democrats have to do is take a page from the republican playbook, dig in their heels, and do nothing. joining me now is someone else who's ready to go off the cliff, bruce bartlett, who served as executive director of the joint economic committee, as senior policy analyst in the reagan white house, and as deputy assistant secretary of the treasury during george h.w. bush's administration. he's now a columnist for the fiscal times and author of the book, "the benefit and the burden." bruce, we heard today in some terms, anyway, from both president obama and mitt romney about the coming fiscal cliff and sequester, a bunch of different terms being used for this. let's listen to what the president said about it. >> those big across-the-board cuts, including defense that congress said would occur next year if they couldn't reach a deal to reduce the deficit. there are a number of republicans in congress who don't want you to know that most of them voted for these cuts.

now they're trying to wriggle out of what they agreed to do. >> bruce, the republicans are getting very nervous about some of this and especially, according to your reporting, the defense cuts. >> that's right. as you know, a big part of the sequester or the fiscal cliff, rather, is a $1.2 trillion spending cut, 600 on the defense side, 600 on the domestic side. and the republicans are very panic about the 600 on the defense side. dick cheney has been telling them, oh, you can't do this. our defenses will be gutted, and other things of that sort. and one of the interesting things is that they're trumpeting a study from the aerospace industries association, protecting 2 million jobs will be lost from this defense sequester. but that suggests that we're also going to lose 2 million from the nondefense sequester, and that also suggests that if

spending cuts reduce jobs, then maybe spending increases might increase them. >> and bruce, so that's republicans saying, look, we have a study that says, if we cut defense spending, we will lose jobs. and they have been arguing in the past, including paul ryan and all these people, that the government has no affect on jobs whatsoever. >> well, on the contrary, they say that cutting spending increases jobs. that is what paul ryan has said. and so, now they're kind of caught in this conflict, now that their sacred cow is being cut, and i think it's important that the people understand the illogic of their position. >> let's listen to what mitt romney had to say about this. >> what the president should do is say, look, we're going to extend for at least a year the -- well, i would like to see it permanent, but at least a year, the current tax

environment. this sequestration related to defense spending, in particular, has to be put off. >> bruce, that's mitt romney tonight on cnbc, clearly afraid of what's coming here. >> that's right. and one of the things that i noted in my column is that there's a law that requires companies that are going to have to have mass layoffs to give 60 days' notice. now, if you compact 60 days from december 31st, you come to about five days before the election. and i think that's one of the things republicans are concerned about. but i do agree completely with what you're saying about the tax side and peter orszag and other people such as myself have been endorsing this idea for months. my fear, though, is that obama will not sufficiently exploit this situation and will simply ask congress to continue the bush tax cuts, except for the top 2% or above 250, and that's all. and that's not enough. we need to do a lot more than

that. >> bruce, my guess is, tonight, if the president asked for that, he wouldn't get it from democrat s. there would be democrats like patty murray and others that would say, nope, we're going to go off the cliff. bruce bartlett, thank you very much for joining us tonight. >> thank you. >> send us your designs for the "off the cliff!" campaign button. you can tweet us, facebook us, or e-mail us. coming up, mitt romney versus mitt romney on abortion. a video that you really have to see, watch mitt romney changing his contradictory positions on abortion through the years. that's coming up. if there was a pill to help protect your eye health as you age... would you take it? well, there is. [ male announcer ] it's called ocuvite. a vitamin totally dedicated to your eyes, from the eye-care experts at bausch + lomb. as you age, eyes can lose vital nutrients. ocuvite helps replenish key eye nutrients.

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sally ride, the first american woman to fly in space, has died. sally ride rode into space in 1983 when she was 32 years old and once again, the next year, later she served as the first director of nasa's office of exploration and founded sally ride science to help teachers and students of science technology and math. she died today of pancreatic cancer at her home in la jolla, california. sally ride was 61 years old. also leaving us today here in los angeles, academy award-winning screenwriter, frank pierson. he graduated from harvard college in 1946, began writing

for 1950s television series and wrote some of the most memorable scenes in film industry. >> that we've got here is failure to communicate. some men, you just can't reach. >> kiss me, man. >> what? >> kiss me. when i'm being [ bleep ], i like to get kissed a lot. >> come on. >> you're a city cop, right? robbing a bank is a federal offense. they've got me on kidnapping and robbery. get somebody in charge here. >> i am in charge here. >> i don't want to talk to some flunky pick trying to calm me. >> what are you doing? will you get back there! get the [ bleep ] back there! go back there, man! get over there. >> he wants to kill me, so be it. he can taste it. >> attica! attica! attica! attica!

>> frank pierson once described his method to younger writers this way. sit down at 10:00 in the morning and write anything that comes into my head until 12:00. one of the few things i've discovered about writing is to form a habit that becomes an addiction so that if you don't put something down on paper every day, you get really mean and awful, with withdrawal symptoms and your wife and your dog and your kids are going to kick your ass until you get back to it, because they can't bear you in that state of mind. frank pierson left his wife, his two children, and five grandchildren. frank pierson was 87 years old. [ donovan ] i hit a wall.

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[ male announcer ] this is our beach. ♪ this is our pool. ♪ our fireworks. ♪ and our slip and slide. you have your idea of summer fun, and we have ours. now during the summer event get an exceptionally engineered mercedes-benz for an exceptional price. but hurry, this offer ends july 31st. and my view is that we should, we should protect the sanctity of life, unborn, and living. and -- or unborn and born. >> that was mitt romney just 13 days ago, telling a republican audience his current position on abortion. that's a long way from the mitt romney who ran for governor of massachusetts, saying he would never, never waiver on keeping abortion safe and legal, because

he personally lost someone close to his family after an illegal abortion. mitt romney publicly announced that position, only after commissioning a poll that found that a pro-life candidate couldn't win statewide in massachusetts. in the spotlight tonight, william from slate.com has chronicled mitt romney's political and moral evolution on abortion. >> preserve and protect a woman's right to choose, a woman's right to choose, for a woman to make that choice herself. the woman should have the right to make her own choices as to whether or not to have an abortion. but a woman should haveer own right to choose, i that will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose. when i'm governor, and i'm convinced i will be, i will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose. i do not take the position of a pro-life candidate. i'm in favor of preserving and protecting a woman's right to choose. >> five years later, when romney was running for president as a

pro-lifer, he developed an amazing case of anesthesia. >> i didn't feel i was pro-choice. >> reporter: when romney ran for the senate in 1994, he didn't just support abortion rights, he said pro-choice voters could count on him because he had personal experience with abortion. >> many, many years ago, i had a dear close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. it is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. and you will not see me wavering on that. >> reporter: but years later when he was running for president, romney didn't just waver, he insisted that until he become governor, abortion had been just a theoretical issue. >> it was quite theoretical and philosophical, to consider what the role of government should be in this regard. and i felt that the supreme court had spoken and that government shouldn't be involved and let people make their own decisions. and then i became governor. and the theoretical became reality, if you will.

>> reporter: the reality of romney's relative dying from an illegal abortion had apparently been forgotten. when romney started to run for president, he started to tell this story about a conversation in 2004 that changed his life. >> a couple of years ago, as we were dealing with actually stem cell research, i sat down with a researcher and he said, look, you don't have to think about this stem cell research as a moral issue, because we kill the embryos after 14 days. and i -- that struck me, as he said that. and i thought, is that the extent to which we've cheapened life? has the roe v. wade process and approach so cheapened life that we think about killing embryos without batting an eye? and i recognized that i can no longer stand in the posture of saying, look, i'm personally opposed, but i'm not going to change the law. i needed to make it very clear that in my view, we are wrong to accept abortion, other than in cases of rape and incest. >> reporter: but that conversion story doesn't hold up.

because after that conversation in 2004, romney kept saying the same thing he had always said. that he was personally opposed to abortion, but he wouldn't change the law. here's what romney told "washington post" reporters in february 2005. >> so i'm personally pro-life. as governor of massachusetts, which is an overwhelming pro-choice state, i committed that i would not change the laws relating to abortion. >> well, do you support making abortion illegal? i'm not talking about what you would do as governor of massachusetts. >> yeah, but that's all -- that's the furthest i'm going to take you right now. >> reporter: romney doesn't just claim to have had a personal conversion experience, he claims he tried to make his state pro-life. >> the conclusion i reached was that we had gone too far, that cloning and that creating new embryos was wrong, and that we should, therefore, allow our state to become a pro-life state. >> reporter: pro-life state? >> pro-life state. >> reporter: that's not what the record shows.

here's what romney actually said in 2005, well after his so-called conversion experience. >> i am absolutely committed to my promise to maintain the status quo with regards to laws relating to abortion and choice. and so far, have been able to successfully do that. and my personal, philosophical views, my -- about, you know, this issue, are not something that i think would do anything other than distract -- >> reporter: contrast that with what romney said three years later when he ran for president. >> on every decision i could make as governor, i came down on the side of life. on the issue of abortion, for instance, i came down on the side of life, consistently as governor, in every way i knew how i could do that. >> reporter: "in every way i could." what romney is saying that is that after his conversion, he decided he would support the pro-life position on any bill that came to his desk, but that isn't true. we know it isn't true because "the washington post" reporters who interviewed romney in february of 2005 saved their recording. here's what romney said in that

interview about a conversation with a member of his staff. >> sean came to me the other day and said, oh, there's a new bill coming up with regards to a particular matter. and i said, don't tell me what it does, i will veto it. it relates to choice and abortion. i said, i don't know whether it's pro-life or pro-choice. i said i would not support any change to the law while i was governor. >> so what does romney really think about abortion? here's what he said in october 2011 on fox news. >> yeah, i am pro-life and would prefer to have the courts decide that individuals -- rather, that states have the ability to make their own decisions with regards to abortion. individuals -- states. individuals -- states have their the ability to make their own decisions with regards to abortion. >> with me now, will who covers politics for slate.com.

will, i want to go to a point in your story about that, where you talk about a trip to salt lake that mitt had to make when he was going to become a pro-choice candidate. you say he went to speak to the leaders of the lds church there. you said, he told them that he would say that he opposed abortion personally, but that such private beliefs shouldn't be imposed on others. romney argued that this view was acceptable under the doctrine of free agency and he used the poll data to close the sale. if he didn't frame his position as pro-choice, he'd lose. many of the church leaders were unhappy with romney's formulation, but if they wanted him in the senate, this was the best they were going to get. will, that is as strange a political religious meeting as i've ever read of. >> and that's classic romney. you know, romney -- it was the beginning of a pattern that has characterized his whole career. here's a guy who comes from a background that is pro-life. he's a mormon. he's a believing mormon about

abortion. and he's got a mom who's pro-choice. and he's got this personal experience of a woman in his family who died from an illegal abortion. and he essentially can play the issue either way. depending on which side of his heart he emphasizes. he's kind of like a running back, who just sees the defender coming and sort of steps this way, then the other way, and it's back and forth and back and forth. navigating his way through the political minefield. and that situation with the mormon church is fascinating, because he's going to a religious organization, and he's trying to tell them how he can square the position he's going to take with them, and he essentially hands them this poll, and says, my pollster says i have to say this. and you're just going to have to eat it. otherwise you won't have a member of church has a senator in massachusetts. >> you also got this -- you have this other quote from someone, a mormon feminist, actually, who was quite pleased with mitt romney's choice to be a pro-choice candidate, and she said -- this is her story. she said, "i went to his office

and i congratulated him on taking a pro-choice position and his response was, well, they told me in salt lake city i could take this position, and in fact, i probably had to, in order to win in a liberal state like massachusetts." and will, she then went on the to say that she was disappointed that he didn't seem genuinely a pro-choice. but then he insisted that he was genuinely pro-choice. >> right, this is as genuine as mitt's going to get about abortion. and she shouldn't be disappointed, but what he says there about it's a pro-choice state, a state like massachusetts, i have to take this position. that's the pattern with romney. romney's whole career on abortion, and we see this later on with some other issues, like whether the individual mandate is a tax or a penalty, or whether he was ceo of bain capital, what we see is, he's got a series of changes over the course of history, and then afterwards, he tries to go back and whitewash it, that it was all one thing. but i count, lawrence, actually about seven different positions

where romney took on abortion, where he stepped back the other way. so he starts out with this sort of mixed background. he takes this poll, i've got to be pro-choice because i'm running in massachusetts. he goes to the mormon church and tell them how it squares with their pro-life belief. then he runs for senate and tells the very moving story about the woman in his family, that he's passionately pro-choice. goes back out to utah, thinking about running for governor, talks about his prolive position. then goes back to massachusetts and running for governor, then running for president, running as a pro-lifer again. >> will, the way you laid it out in the piece, it's a much more twisted and strange road than i thought. i want everyone go to slate.com and watch the full video. we showed a little bit more half of it there, but a great video. will saletan of slate, thank you very much for joining us tonight. >> thank you, lawrence. next in the "rewrite," did the founding fathers really want criminals to be able to buy unlimited amounts of ammunition? were they really trying to

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another huge win for the grover norquist of gun control. wayne la pierre. wayne is the blood-drenched lobbyist who makes sure anyone in america, anyone can get 6,000 bullets. even people who want to use those bullets to shoot babies in movie theaters. wayne lapierre is not a credit hog like grover norquist. grover loves flexing his anti-tax lobbying muscles publicly. he loves calling senators idiots. he loves taking credit for preventing any sensible tax policy in this country. wayne is a old school. wayne lapierre follows the old lobbyist playbook of never publicly taking credit for anything. every time an american mass murderer uses the right that wayne has preserved for any one in this country, including al qaeda and homicidal maniacs, to buy insane amounts of

ammunition, and then that mass murderer gets huge headlines, wall-to-wall cable news coverage, and comments from the president, wayne lapierre never takes credit for any of that. never. wayne always does a kind of, ah, shucks, modesty thing and says, if i couldn't make sure that that mass murderer could get all those bullets, he would have used something else to kill all those people. talk about modesty, huh. maybe some of our mass murderers would have found another way to kill a lot of people, but we'll never know, will we? because wayne has just made it so very easy to kill babies with bullets. to kill fathers and mothers with a bullets. to kill sons and daughters with bullets. to kill sisters and brothers with bullets. bullets are the american mass murderer's first choice. and what we'll never know is how

many of them would be successful mass murderers today if wayne lapierre didn't make sure they could easily get bullets, unlimited supplies of bullets. how many of our mass murderers would switch to making bomb ifs they couldn't get bullets? and how many of them would blow themselves up by mistake while making bombs and never hurt anyone else? surely a few of them. just how determined are american mass murderers? we'll never know, because wayne lapierre makes it so, so easy for mass murderers. wayne has not said a word about our most recent mass murder. on friday, he had his press secretary put out this statement. "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the community. nra will not have any further comment until all the facts are known." see how modest wayne is? he's the head of the national

rifle association, and he wouldn't even put his name on yet another high-profile nra press release about a mass murder. wayne presumably spent the weekend enjoying the summer with family and friends, none of whom were shot by a mass murderer this weekend. wayne's unlimited ammo-for-all policy has never negatively affected wayne's life in any way. i invited wayne to come on this program tonight, but you know wayne. even when he deserves 24-hour media attention, wayne lapierre is the perfect picture of modesty. blood-drenched modesty. ask me what it's like when my tempur-pedic moves. why not talk to someone who owns an adjustable version of the most highly recommended bed in america?

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i'm going to read 12 names and i would like, after i read each name, i would like -- i would like you each to say together, we well remember. john blunk, we well remember. a.j. boik -- >> we well remember. >> jesse childress. >> we will remember. >> gordon cowden. >> we will remember. >> jessica ghawi. >> we will remember. >> john larimer. >> we will remember. >> matt mcquinn. >> we will remember. >> micayla me edemedek. >> we will remember. >> veronica moser sullivan. >> we will remember.

>> alex sullivan. >> we will remember. >> alex teves. >> we will remember. >> and rebecca wingo. >> we will remember. >> i was asked to anchor a special edition of the "last word" on friday night and i was available to do it, but i declined. not only did i not want to participate in that first-day coverage of america's latest mass murder, i didn't know what i wanted to say about it. i only knew that i didn't want to say the suspect's name and i didn't want to show pictures of him, because attention is so obviously one of the things he desperately wanted. i actually then sealed myself off from the coverage on friday. i didn't want to hear a word about it. i read "the new york times" account saturday morning, and actually have avoided collecting much more information about it since then. i considered actually doing a show tonight that would not mention our latest mass murder in any way, a show that would deny the murderer the attention he wants. a show that would be a subtle and probably too-subtle

predictor of where the news media is headed with this story, which is, of course, to, in effect, drop it, eventually, as the american media always does with american mass murder stories, without ever showing the way out of this trap of gun violence in america. joining me now with his reaction to our latest american mass murder, charles m. blow, opinion writer for "the new york times." charles, i saw your saturday piece about gun control polling statistics and things, but i would really just like to hand you the rest of this show, to get your reaction about what you've observed and what you've been thinking since friday. >> right. i think that, obviously, in this case, and in every case, where a life is lost, where someone is murdered, your heart goes out to the victims of that murder. and definitely, in this case, because of the scale of it, the tragedy of it, and i think that it's important for us to start

to look, and do lightning a self-examination and say, what does this say about us as a society? whether or not this happens in other places around the world, we, you know, construct laws for our country. we have a society in which we live and we can determine how that society operates. and in that construct, we must look at how we interact with guns in this society. we must look at how we deal with people who are obviously psychologically disturbed and how those people may come to interact with guns. guns are incredibly efficient and unforgiving killing weapons. and guns will, in most cases, outlive the person who purchases

that gun. we owe it to ourselves as a civil society to say, how do we track all of the guns that flow into our society? we owe it to ourselves to say, how do we manage ammunition and should assault weapons but allowed into the hands of people in the general population? because invariably, they also go into the hands of the people who may be mentally disturbed, and we can't necessarily always run interference. this is not to say that we will, tomorrow, end all mass killings in america, but we must start to make steps in that direction, because as -- you know, what we have now just doesn't work. and if the nra is basically going to hold the position that the way we prevent these things from happening is to arm