Robert De Niro Slams the NRA: Things in Our Country Are So Bad, and It Comes From Trump

April 4, 2018

The actor also told IndieWire that he has no interest in reaching across the aisle to opposing points of view.

Robert De Niro has made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump. The actor made headlines a month before the 2016 election by declaring that he’d like to punch the future president in the face, and during a speech at the National Board of Review’s gala in January, he declared, “this fucking idiot is our president.” Now, as De Niro gears up for the 2018 edition of Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded in 2002, he has found some semblance of progress in one area of the political landscape — the debate about gun control.

“The people that I care about are those young people who demonstrated,” he said, in an interview with IndieWire at his Tribeca office with festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal, referencing the survivors of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida and other high school students who marched in Washington last month. “They’re the future. They know. They say, ‘We’ll remember in November.’ They’re the ones that feel the way we do, not the way the gun lovers and the NRA do, with all that idiocy to the point of absurdity.”

De Niro has spoken out about gun control before. In 2012, after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, he told New York magazine, “One thing that there should be is some regulation of guns … It’s crazy how almost anyone can get access to a gun.” Now, he’s offering a more pointed criticism, singling out the influence of the NRA on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “The CDC can’t even do a study because the NRA stopped it,” De Niro said. “The CDC works for us! How can the NRA stop that? What kind of absurd logic is that?”

http://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/robert-de-niro-nra-gun-violence-criticism-1201949215/