The NRA's Wayne LaPierre speaks at Friday's press conference (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The National Rifle Association on Friday, a full week after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, gave its first response to the massacre that killed 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, argued at a press conference in Washington, D.C., that gun control legislation would not prevent similar shootings and offered the organization's own proposal: a nationwide program that would place armed security in every school desiring protection.

"I call on Congress today to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation," LaPierre said. The proposed program, called the National School Shield, would help train and install security at schools nationwide under the leadership of former Arkansas Republican Rep. Asa Hutchinson.

"Innocent lives might have been spared," LaPierre said, if armed security was present at Sandy Hook. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

LaPierre, Hutchinson and David Keene, president of the NRA, all declined to take questions from the press and said NRA press officers won't be responding to the media until Monday.

LaPierre in part blamed mass shootings on "vicious, violent video games" such as "Bulletstorm," "Grand Theft Auto," Mortal Kombat" and  "Splatterhouse." He also reached back in time to place blame on movies like "American Psycho" and "Natural Born Killers" for portraying "life as a joke and murder as a way of life."

He added, "In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes—every minute of every day of every month of every year.”

He also criticized the media for vilifying guns and gun owners, and for publicizing inaccuracies about guns.

"Why is the idea of a gun good when it’s used to protect the president of our country or our police, but bad when it’s used to protect children in our schools?" he asked.

"It’s our duty to protect them," LaPierre said of the nation's schoolchildren. "It’s our right to protect them."

Part of the problem in protecting schools, he also said, is the designation of gun-free school zones. The zones "tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk," he said.

Gun control advocates immediately decried the NRA's views as extreme and dangerous.

"Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, said in a statement. "Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe."

President Barack Obama announces the nomination of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) as secretary of state. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)President Barack Obama formally nominated Democratic Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry on Friday to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, calling him "the perfect choice to guide American diplomacy" in his second term.

The move came after Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, withdrew from consideration for the post rather than face a painful confirmation battle with an uncertain outcome.

"John’s entire life has prepared him for this role," Obama said with Kerry at his side in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Vice President Joe Biden and Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, were also present.

"Over these many years, John’s earned the respect and confidence of leaders around the world. He is not going to need a lot of on-the-job training," Obama said. "I think it’s fair to say that few individuals know as many presidents and prime ministers, or grasp our foreign policies as firmly as John Kerry. And this makes him a perfect choice to guide American diplomacy in the years ahead."

Kerry is expected to sail through confirmation by the Senate.

The president also paid tribute to his "outstanding secretary of state, my friend, Secretary Hillary Clinton," saying she had played "one of the most important" roles in guiding America on the world stage. Obama said Clinton had hoped to attend the announcement but "she continues to recuperate" from a stomach virus that led her to faint and suffer a concussion. The president added that he had spoken to her earlier and found her "in good spirits."

Kerry, 69, has played an important role in promoting Obama’s foreign policy over the past four years. In Congress, Kerry has advanced priorities like a landmark nuclear arms control accord with Russia, known as New START, and has undertaken sensitive missions overseas. He visited Syria in 2009 to take the measure of President Bashar Assad, and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan several times to defuse diplomatic crises. At times, he has appeared to be ahead of the administration on policies it ultimately embraced, like intervention in Libya.

“I’ve called on his talents and diplomatic skills on several occasions on complex challenges," Obama said on Friday. "Each time, he has been exemplary." 

President Barack Obama is experiencing an approval bounce in the wake of the Newtown, Conn,. shooting tragedy, according to a new poll from Gallup.

The president received a 56 percent approval rating Dec. 17-19 (and a 37 percent disapproval rating). Gallup reports that was his highest three-day rating since October 2009.

Gallup, in its analysis, suggests that the shooting may have rallied Americans around the president and/or they approve of his handling of the tragedy.

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport writes: