Pulling off the proverbial gloves and essentially declaring war on the media and anti-gun politicians, the National Rifle Association’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, told Saturday’s annual members’ meeting in Dallas that the fight to defend Second Amendment rights is far from over.

“Together,” said Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, “we’re the most bare-knuckled defenders of individual freedom in American history. Have we won every fight? No. Is the work finished? Far from it. Is the NRA the only thing standing between the most organized and energized enemy of firearm freedom in American history? You’re damn right it is. And we’re not going anywhere.”

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Cox told NRA members that the organization will not take the blame for tragedies, especially the school shooting in Parkland, Florida in February. Instead, he criticized anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg for the attacks on law-abiding gun owners.

“In the wake of the Parkland tragedy,” Cox said, “he (Boomberg) and his freedom-hating allies in Congress, in the media and in the shadows, didn’t organize a single protest against the authorities who should have done their jobs and stopped the killer. Not one. Instead, they focused America’s attention on blaming you and me. These people know damn well the NRA has nothing to do with that tragedy, or any other tragedy.

“If you care about holding people accountable for Parkland,” Cox continued, “you ought to start with that miserable excuse for a sheriff. Or try the FBI, who were notified multiple times about the killer and did nothing. Or how about the armed sheriff’s deputy who refused to go into the school while children were being slaughtered?”

Cox also pointed a blaming finger at former President Barack Obama, noting Obama’s “Promise program” that was, he asserted, a “disaster of social engineering was designed to juice the statistics by not enforcing violent behavior at schools.”

Away from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Saturday, a small group of protesters called for “sensible gun laws,” without defining what that meant. For the tens of thousands of NRA members gathered for this weekend’s 147^th annual convention, gun control proposals that have invariably been offered in the wake of tragic shooting incidents have been nonsense; restrictions on law-abiding citizens that would not have prevented a single incident even if they had been in place.

Cox, as did NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, and on Friday President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, warned NRA members that this fall’s midterm elections are critical. He urged members to vote and become politically active to prevent Congress from falling to the Democrats.

“If we don’t come out stronger, more united and more committed than ever before, this meeting next year will feel like a funeral,” Cox said. “So let’s get united and let’s get inspired, and let’s prove the experts wrong once again.”

The annual convention wraps up Sunday with workshops and seminars, and a massive exhibit hall displaying guns and gear from every major gun manufacturer in the country.