In late September 2017, Eric Church performed at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. Speaking to Rolling Stone, he called it “one of the best shows I’ve had.”
Two days later, on October 1, a shooter targeted the crowd during fellow performer Jason Aldean’s set, killing 58 and injuring hundreds more.
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After the fact, Church shared that the shooting has changed his views on guns “a little.”
“I’m a Second Amendment guy,” he explained. “That’s in the Constitution, it’s people’s right, and I don’t believe it’s negotiable. But nobody should have that many guns and that much ammunition and we don’t know about it. Something’s gotta be done so that a person can’t have an armory and pin down a Las Vegas SWAT team for six minutes. That’s f—ed up.”
The 41-year-old pointed to the National Rifle Association as one of the reasons nothing has been done when it comes to gun control.
“There are some things we can’t stop,” he opined. “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. I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA.”
“I feel like they’ve been a bit of a roadblock,” he explained. “I don’t care who you are — you shouldn’t have that kind of power over elected officials.”
As for the negative reaction he might receive for his comments, the “Desperate Man” singer isn’t too concerned.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Right’s right and wrong’s wrong. I don’t understand why we have to fear a group [like the NRA]. It’s asinine. Why can’t we come together and solve one part of this? Start with the bump stocks and the gun shows. Shut a couple of these down. I do think that will matter a little bit. I think it will save some lives.”
Church also shared that when he initially learned of the shooting, he shared that he “felt like the bait.”
“It’s selfish of me, but my first thought was, ‘I hope it’s not our fans,’” he recalled. “We had a lot of fans there. I felt like the bait: People come to see you play, then all of a sudden they die? That is not an emotion that I was prepared to deal with. It wrecked me in a lot of ways.”
Some of those killed were Church’s fans — one fan, Sonny Melton, was laid to rest in a Church t-shirt.
“It got dark for me for a while,” admitted Church. “I went through a period, a funk, for six months at least. I had anger. I’ve still got anger. Something broke in me that night, and it still hasn’t healed. There’s a part of me that hopes it haunts me forever.”
Photo Credit: Getty / Erika Goldring
