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The National Rifle Association’s new president, Carolyn Meadows, came at Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) with some racist and sexist remarks in a recent interview, suggesting the congresswoman won her November election because she’s a black woman.
Meadows, who is from Georgia, told the Marietta Daily Journal that “we’ll get that seat back,” in reference to McBath’s congressional seat in the 6th District.
“But it is wrong to say like McBath said, that the reason she won was because of her anti-gun stance,” Meadows said in the interview, published Sunday. “That didn’t have anything to do with it ― it had to do with being a minority female.”
“And the Democrats really turned out,” she added. “And that’s the problem we have with conservatives — we don’t turn out as well.”
McBath, a political newcomer, defeated Republican incumbent Karen Handel in November in a major upset. (Handel had famously beaten heavily funded Democrat Jon Ossoff in a 2017 special election.) McBath won in the suburban Atlanta district ― long a Republican stronghold ― after campaigning on a bold gun control platform.
McBath, now 58, was a spokeswoman for gun safety group Moms Demand Action before running for office. She became an advocate for gun control after a white man complaining about loud music shot and killed her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, at a Florida gas station in 2012.
In a series of tweets Monday, the lawmaker responded to the NRA:
“Hi NRA! It’s time we clear something up. I won this race because – after my son was senselessly murdered in 2012 – I stood up to do something about it,” McBath wrote, adding that her work on gun violence and other issues is “just starting.”
“And yes – as a woman of color I am proud to be part of the most diverse class in American history,” she added, referring to the 116th Congress, which included more women and people of color than ever before.
Meadows recently became the NRA’s president after the previous head of the gun lobbying group, Oliver North, stepped down last month amid a series of scandals rocking the organization. The NRA did not immediately reply to HuffPost’s request for comment.
McBath won her seat while touting gun reform in Georgia, a state with gun-friendly laws in the heart of the South, which has some of the nation’s highest rates of gun ownership.
She also benefited from voters turning out in November to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost in an election marred by allegations of voter suppression.
Republicans Newt Gingrich and Tom Price previously represented McBath’s majority-Republican district, which has a highly educated and relatively affluent population that only narrowly went for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Earlier this year, Handel announced she would be running again against McBath in the 2020 election.
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