Eric Church. Getty Images
Country singer Eric Church was one of the headlining performers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last October, where a gunman opened fire on a crowd during the performance of headliner Jason Aldean and killed 59 people in the deadliest mass shooting [1] in US history.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Church discussed the Vegas shooting and placed blame on the National Rifle Association and gun lobbyists for being a "roadblock" to safety.
"There are some things we can't stop," he said. "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 added: "I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA."
Church, who paid tribute to the victims of the shooting in a moving performance at the Grand Ole Opry [2] in October, days after the shooting, told Rolling Stone that he is not a member of the NRA, but that he considers himself "a Second Amendment guy."
"I feel like they've been a bit of a roadblock," Church said of the NRA. "I don't care who you are - you shouldn't have that kind of power over elected officials. To me it's cut-and-dried: The gun-show [loophole] 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."
Church performed two days before the shooting took
