Who Is NRA Spokesperson Dana Loesch?

From Esquire

On February 21, CNN held a town hall about gun control, and things got extremely heated. In attendance were survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, parents of victims, plus Sen. Marco Rubio and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. Also attending was Dana Loesch, the national spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, who had an exchange with student Emma González that went viral.

“I want you to know that we will support your children in a way that you will not,” González said, and asked if she believed it should be harder for people to get semiautomatic weapons. Loesch first praised her for being “politically active,” but didn’t actually answer the question. Israel called her out, saying: “You just told this group of people you’re standing up for them. You’re not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’” She didn’t respond.

Loesch, pronounced lash, has risen to prominence as an outspoken conservative and gun-control advocate, who is not afraid to stoke controversy with outrageous rhetoric. Here’s what you need to know about her.

She grew up in a Democratic family.

According to a profile in the Riverfront Times, Loesch, born Dana Eaton, grew up in a family of blue-collar Southern Democrats in Missouri. Her love of guns started early; her grandfather taught her how to shoot BB guns in the backyard, The Washington Post reports, and she has written about remembering seeing her grandfather on his porch carrying a shotgun to protect her aunt from her estranged husband.

She first got interested in politics in high school, when her liberal history teacher had her play Bill Clinton during a class debate. She dropped out of Webster University when she got pregnant, and married her husband, Chris Loesch, a Republican, in 2000.

The September 11 attacks occurred when her son, Liam, was just six months old, and the tragedy took away the last of her left-wing views. She told Politico she remembers “looking at my husband and saying, ‘Thank God George W. Bush is president. Holy crap, I can’t believe I just said that.’”

She got her start as a mommy blogger.

Loesch first made a name for herself writing on her blog, Mamalogues, about her life as a homeschooling mom. The blog, which she started in 2004, was so successful that it eventually got picked up by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a column.

But the blog wasn’t political; it was her nationally syndicated radio show, The Dana Show, that launched her career as a conservative commentator. After her column nabbed local attention, radio host Jamie Allman asked her to contribute to his program. She became a regular contributor, and then got her own show on Sunday evenings, which quickly became a ratings success and expanded from there.

She later worked for outlets like Breitbart and the Blaze, and she still has a nationally syndicated radio show. On top of that, she’s a frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, and ABC.

She said soldiers who urinated on Taliban corpses were “cool.”

In 2012, when she was a contributor to CNN, she said on her radio show that she didn’t have a problem with Marines who urinated on dead Taliban soldiers. “I’d drop trou and do it too. That’s me, though. I want a million cool points for these guys,” she said, according to The Huffington Post. “C’mon people, this is a war. Do I have a problem with that as a citizen of the United States? No, I don’t.”

CNN distanced itself from her, saying in a statement that their commentators’ “viewpoints are their own.” Loesch later responded, saying the backlash to the Marines' action was "disproportionate" to what they actually did.

She started speaking out on guns because of threats against her.

According to the Riverfront Times, she took concealed-carry classes after she received a threat of violence from a listener. "I wanted my kids to be able to look at their mom and be like, 'She can take care of herself,’” she said.

She ended up writing a book, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America, in 2014. “I take gun rights very personally,” she wrote, according to The Washington Post. “I view it as a threat to my and my family’s well-being whenever anyone seeks to erode or take away my Second Amendment civil liberty.”

She says she still gets violent threats, even noting that “repeated threats from gun control advocates” have forced her to move. And she told The New York Times that she has a firearm near her bed in case of an intruder. A sign over the door of the house she had to move from said: “This home is protected by the good lord and a gun. If you came here to steal or do harm you might meet them both.”

She supported Ted Cruz in 2016.

Loesch, who once cofounded a local Tea Party chapter in St. Louis, wasn’t originally a Trump supporter. She lent her support to Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and endorsed him on her radio show.

“You really best, to me, embody those flyover values and I appreciate your fight because this has been a story of David and Goliath,” she told Cruz on the air, according to Politico. “You’re a godly man and, as I said, you’ve been consistent, so we’re praying for you and we’re pulling for you.”

She became the NRA’s official spokesperson in 2017.

According to The Hill, Loesch was named a national spokesperson for the NRA in February 2017. The previous year, she was tapped to serve as a special adviser on women’s policy issues, and had contributed commentary videos to NRA TV.

“I’ve been impressed with Dana’s command of the issues facing the NRA, as well as her ability to communicate our positions and connect with women, and men, on those issues,” LaPierre, CEO of the NRA, said in a statement.

She was the star of a controversial ad.

In June 2017, Loesch starred in a recruitment ad for the NRA that became the center of controversy. She narrated:

Tamika Mallory, co-president of the Women’s March, issued an open letter to NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre against what she called “irresponsible and dangerous propaganda” that advocated for violence against people who don’t agree with the Trump administration’s policies.

Loesch doubled down in another ad, directly targeting The New York Times, saying, “We’re coming for you.” She said “we’re going to fisk the New York Times,” meaning to debunk them, though many misheard it as “fist,” thinking it was yet another call for violence. Regardless, the ad's rhetoric was extreme, and the group Digital Content Next accused her of threatening journalists, which Loesch denied.

She has her support for gun rights tattooed on her arm.

According to CNN, Loesch has Ephesians 6:12-13 tattooed on her forearm. That references the call for Christians to “put on the full armor of God” to fight off evil. It’s easy to figure out the connection to her support for gun rights.

You Might Also Like

• 10 Grown-Up Backpacks That Won't Make You Look Like a Kid

• New York in the '70s: The Photos

• The Most Stylish Ways to Organize Your Life This Fall