"We're stronger than we've ever been," said NRA President David Keene.
He comes to Houston against the backdrop for an ongoing national conversation about guns and the second amendment, in light of last year's school shooting in Connecticut and failed gun control legislation in the Senate last month.
"Guns are not the problem. The people who misuse firearms, or the people who shouldn't have them, they're the problem," Keene said.
We asked him then why oppose universal background checks?
"First of all, nobody proposed universal background checks," he said.
Keene says mental health is the real issue and based on little information indicated as much as it relates to Thursday's incident at Bush Intercontinental Airport.
"This sounds to me like somebody that was sick. But I don't like to comment about something I don't know about," said Keene.
The gun debate is also drawing attention to groups advocating change.
"We're Republicans, we're Democrats, we're gun owners, we're non-gun owners but I just think that story made us feel vulnerable and made us feel that we need to take action," said Michelle Green with the Houston chapter of Moms Demand Action.
The upstart group formed after the Sandy Hook shooting. And they want what they call common sense gun laws.
"We just want some common sense laws put in place so that we make sure that criminals aren't easily able to access guns, to make sure that we don't have weapons out that can cause the kind of damage that
we saw at Newtown," Green said.
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