CEO Wayne LaPierre’s name nowhere to be found on conservative conference agenda, although NRA says speech has not been cancelled

The NRA appears to be trying to “dial down” a high-profile appearance by its leader Wayne LaPierre near Washington this week.

LaPierre’s name is nowhere to be found on the official agenda for CPAC, the conservative conference which begins in Maryland on Wednesday. An NRA spokesman said the executive vice-president and CEO had not cancelled his speech, but that he did not know when he would be speaking.

Donald Trump, Mike Pence and other key conservative figures are expected to speak at the conference.

Grieving high school students from Parkland, Florida, have spoken out publicly following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school on 14 February, accusing politicians for having “blood on their hands” for voting with the NRA and opposing gun control.

“We’re making a badge of shame for anyone accepting money from the NRA,” Cameron Kasky, one of the leaders of the new student gun control movement, told the Guardian. “It’s not red versus blue, Republican versus Democrat, it’s us versus those who are trying to kill us and don’t care about our lives.”

LaPierre is one of America’s most confrontational rightwing leaders. After 20 students and six teachers were massacred in Connecticut in 2012, LaPierre doubled down on the NRA’s gun rights message, and argued “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. He proposed putting armed police officers in every school in America.

The speech sparked a backlash, and LaPierre’s face was splashed on New York tabloid covers, which branded him as a “gun nut” and a “loon”.

At CPAC last year, LaPierre did not bask in the victory of placing a $30m bet on Donald Trump winning the White House, at a time when many other conservative groups were refusing to endorse him. Instead, he went on the offensive against what he described as dangerous leftists, accusing federal judges of throwing “a Molotov cocktail at the US constitution” for ruling against Trump’s travel ban, and calling their rulings a “form of violence against our constitutional system”.

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As the NRA advertised that it was mounting a “counter-resistance” to the resistance against Trump, LaPierre painted the peaceful opposition to Trump’s presidency as a dangerous threat to public safety. Leftist groups “all share one thing in common: they’re angry, they’re militant, and they’re willing to engage in criminal violence to get what they want”.

LaPierre’s speech foreshadowed the direction the NRA, Trump, and other rightwing groups would take later that year, after neo-Nazis marched in the streets in Charlottesville, Virginia: rather than taking a hard line against neo-Nazis and racist hate groups, Trump condemned “both sides” and the NRA has focused on being anti-anti-fascist.

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What LaPierre will do with his new speech, in what way he may try to pivot or find a new way to go on the offensive, remains to be seen.

The NRA, which usually stays silent in the days immediately after a mass shooting, is still in “duck and cover” mode after the Parkland shooting, said Bob Spitzer, a political scientist who writes about the gun control movement. Delaying any news of the exact timing of his speech “dials it down a little bit and gives him [LaPierre] a little bit of maneuver room”.

“To pull his appearance entirely, that would probably be seen as too cowardly,” he said. Instead, he said the NRA might try to slot LaPierre in at the last minute, or squeeze him between other speakers to make his address more low-key.

“They’re going to have trouble trying to figure out what you do with old Wayne,” Spitzer said.