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 Houston-based lawyer Charles Cotton, listed as a national NRA
board member on the gun lobby's website, made the comments in an
online chat room he administers called texaschlforum.com, a
discussion board devoted to gun rights and firearms issues.
In an online thread about Wednesday night's mass shooting at the
Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, Cotton said that one
of the nine people slain, church pastor and Democratic state Senator
Clementa Pinckney, had voted against legislation in 2011 that would
have allowed concealed possession of handguns in restaurants,
day-care centers and churches.
"Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly
allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead," Cotton wrote.
 The comments, since deleted from the online forum but ricocheted
across social media in cached versions, triggered a torrent of
online condemnation, with hundreds of posts bombarding Cotton's
Twitter handle branding him a "monster" and "insensitive."
The online Christian social justice organization Faithful America
launched an online campaign seeking 15,000 signatures for a petition
demanding that the NRA remove Cotton from its board and apologize
for his remarks.
Cotton did not respond to requests from Reuters seeking comment.But
The Washington Post quoted him on Friday as saying that the online
discussion that generated the controversy was about the pros and
cons of "gun-free zones," and his comments were made as a private
citizen."It's my opinion that there should not be any gun-free zones
in schools or churches or anywhere else. If we look at mass
shootings that occur, most happen in gun-free zones," he told the
newspaper.
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Authorities have said the suspected gunman in the Charleston
shooting, Dylann Roof, 21, who is white, spent an hour in Bible
study with black parishioners at the nearly 200-year-old church
before opening fire on them. He was charged with nine counts of
murder and a weapons offense on Friday, a day after his arrest in
North Carolina. The U.S. Justice Department said it is investigating
the church attack as both a hate crime and potential act of
terrorism.
(Editing by Steve Gorman)
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