The 'Desperate Man' singer also says that the tragic incident which happened during the Route 91 Festival in 2017 'wrecked him in a lot of ways.'
- Jul 27, 2018
AceShowbiz - Country star Eric Church opened up about his thoughts on mass shooting incident which occurred at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in October 2017 in Las Vegas. The "Springsteen" crooner placed the blame on the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun lobbyists for being "a roadblock" to safety. He also said that the tragic incident "wrecked him in a lot of ways."
"There are some things we can't stop like the disgruntled kid who takes his dad's shotgun and walks into a high school. But we could have stopped the guy in Vegas," he said in an interview with Rolling Stones. "I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA."
Eric, who is not a member of NRA, continued to blame the organization. "I'm a Second Amendment guy, but I feel like they've been a bit of a roadblock. I don't care who you are, you shouldn't have that kind of power over elected officials," the singer stated his opinion. "To me it's cut-and-dried, the gun-show would not exist if it weren't for the NRA, so at this point in time, if I was an NRA member, I would think I had more of a problem than the solution. I would question myself real hard about what I wanted to be in the next three, four, five years."
The shooting incident occurred just two nights after the "Guys Like Me" hitmaker performed at the event and he remembered how it affected him. "My first thought was, 'I hope it's not our fans.' We had a lot of fans there. We even promoted online travel options to make it easier for people to come. I felt like the bait: People come to see you play, then all of a sudden they die?" Eric recalled. "That is not an emotion that I was prepared to deal with. It wrecked me in a lot of ways."
"I went through a period, a funk, for six months at least. I had anger. I've still got anger," he added. "Something broke in me that night, and it still hasn't healed. There's a part of me that hopes it haunts me forever."
The mass shooting happened when a man opened fire at the crowd during Jason Aldean's performance, taking the lives of 59 people. It was dubbed the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
