Evizda

The NRA’s newly-appointed president Oliver North was under fire on Thursday after he compared protest actions against the powerful gun industry lobbyist group to the violent and racist attacks on the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

North claimed in an interview with the Washington Times that the student-led #NeverAgain movement which has invigorated Americans since February’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., amounts to “civil terrorism.”

“This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” said North. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things—even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”

“For the NRA to compare its treatment today to the atrocities that occurred during the Jim Crow era is beyond the pale, especially considering it’s the NRA’s extreme leaders who have harassed and intimidated survivors of gun violence with often vile rhetoric,” said Rev. Sharon Risher, whose family members were killed in a mass shooting at a church in Charleston, S.C. in 2015. “Oliver North should apologize, to black Americans and to all who’ve been touched by racism or gun violence in this country.”

North offered the example of vandalism at NRA lobbyist Chris Cox’s home and unspecified “threats” against the group’s leaders to support his claims. But the #NeverAgain movement has stressed the importance of civil disobedience and urged supporters to “de-escalate confrontations with others,” with organizers of the March for Our Lives, which drew hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C., in March, imploring attendees to “participate nonviolently.”