In a fiery speech Saturday before cheering supporters, the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre took on advocates for new gun laws and said a national background check bill “got the defeat that it deserved."

“We will never surrender our guns, never,” LaPierre, the organization's executive vice president, said on the second day of the gun-rights group’s convention in Houston, Texas.

He argued that recent mass shootings, including the killing of 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school in December, have been used “to blame us, to shame us, to compromise our freedom for their agenda.”

The gun rights lobby’s convention was part victory celebration, part pep rally as the NRA’s leaders cheered the defeat of a background check bill and said they would oppose any new attempts to pass national legislation on guns.

“Our feet are planted firmly in the foundation of freedom, unswayed by the winds of political and media insanity,” LaPierre said. “To the political and media elites who scorn us, we say let them be damned.”

A bill supported by President Barack Obama that would have expanded background checks on gun purchases would have done nothing to stop recent mass shootings, LaPierre said. That bill was defeated in the Senate last month.

“The bill wouldn’t have prevented Newtown or Aurora,” LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, said in his speech to several thousand attendees. “It won’t prevent the next tragedy. None of it has anything to do with keeping our children safer in any school anywhere.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, co-sponsored the background check bill. Toomey has said the bill failed to pass because members of the GOP did not want to hand the White House a policy victory.

LaPierre also referenced the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt as an argument for putting guns in the hands of more Americans.

“How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?” LaPierre said. “Boston proves it. When brave law enforcement officers did their jobs in that city so courageously, good guys with guns stopped terrorists with guns.”

NRA officials confirmed to NBC News that LaPierre’s remarks were the first time the organization had brought up the Boston Marathon bombings in connection with their political fight against new restrictions on guns.

The annual convention was expected to draw about 70,000 people over three days. As many as 550 exhibitors were packed into the George R. Brown Convention Center, bringing with them racks and display cases filled with handguns, rifles, and other firearms.

LaPierre claimed that the NRA’s membership stood at 5 million and said the organization aimed to amass 10 million members.

A lifetime membership in the NRA costs $1,000, and the organization was able to claim that both its youngest and its oldest lifetime members were in attendance on Saturday.

Wayne Burd of Arkansas was born in 1917, and was recognized for the second year running as the rifle association’s oldest lifetime member. Among the freshest faces present was the group’s youngest lifetime member, Elaih Wagan, a 3-year-old from Austin, Texas. Wagan's grandfather purchased a lifetime membership as a gift for the little girl.

NBC News’ Kasie Hunt and Gabe Gutierrez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related: 

• NRA annual meeting convenes as gun-control debate rages
• Toomey: Background check plan failed because of Republican politics
• Republican politicians pay tribute to NRA clout at annual meeting

Months after the National Rifle Association first floated the idea of getting more armed staffers in schools to prevent another Sandy Hook massacre, the idea is slowly gaining traction in some states and districts.

On Tuesday, the NRA fleshed-out leader Wayne LaPierre’s initial response to the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. The report included a model program on how to train and arm school personnel to respond in the event of an active shooter.

The goal is to “give the schools more tools to respond quickly and reduce the loss of lives,” former Republican congressman Asa Hutchinson said while presenting the report.

LaPierre's idea was mocked by some political leaders when it was first proposed in Decmeber -- “What’s next? Armed guards at Starbucks and Little League games?” asked California Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat.

But polling suggests Americans are open to armed guards or staffers, and some lawmakers and school leaders are moving forward.

The Florida House Education Subcommittee approved a bill at the end of March that would arm employees by allowing principals or district superintendents to select individuals to be exempted from prohibitions on carrying firearms on school property.

Tennessee school districts would be allowed to hire additional security personnel or arm a staff member under new legislation.

“This is just an option for those schools who don’t have school resource officers,” Tennessee Rep. Eric Watson, a Republican, told a local newspaper. “This gives schools an option to hire their own security or want staff members willing to serve in that security capacity. Of course, they have to go through a lot of series of training to get to that point.”

Watson’s bill would require that applicants pass an 8-hour handgun safety course. Critics of bills like the one in Tennessee have questioned how much training should be required before someone is allowed to carry a gun in a building full of children.

“Is it a good idea to have private citizens who have had a few hours of training bringing guns into schools? Probably not,” said Arkadi Gerney, a Center for American Progress fellow who works on gun policy. “That may end up creating risks instead of reducing risks.”

The Connecticut towns of North Branford and Enfield have already approved the placement of armed guards in all of their public schools.

“We want to throw as many hurdles as we can before an armed gunman can get into a building,” Enfield police Chief Carl Sferrazza said in March, The Associated Press reported. A job listing for a part-time armed school security officer is now posted on the department’s website. A section listing “Tools & Equipment Used” names one item: “Handgun.”

Guards began patrolling the schools in Marlboro, N.J., barely two weeks after the Newtown, the first school in the state to bring in armed officers after the shooting.

The measure drew skepticism from Republican Governor Chris Christie, who said placing guards among students risked turning school buildings into “an armed camp for kids.”

“I don’t think that’s a positive example for children,” Christie said. “We should be able to figure out some other ways to enhance safety, it seems to me.”

For the most part, critics say, there's been something less than a national movement to embrace arming school staffers.

“It doesn’t look like a serious effort, certainly not a serious national effort to address the real problem,” said Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “There really isn’t any evidence that that sort of thing is effective.”

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio caused a stir in February when he recruited action film star Steven Seagal to train a group of volunteers in what the self-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff” said were exercises in how to protect against school shooters.

“I am here to try to teach the posse firearms and martial arts to try to help them learn how to respond quicker and help protect our children,” Seagal said, according to Reuters.

As lawmakers continue to debate tighter federal regulations on firearms, the rifle association’s decision to focus on school guards steers attention from other gun bills that could do more to curb gun violence, Gerney said.

“To think of that as the only answer is a distraction and an effort to shift the debate away from the measures that are going to shift the debate from measures that would really make a difference,” Gerney said. “The best way to make our kids safer whether they’re in school or not in school is to make it harder for bad guys to get guns in the first place.”

Related:

• NRA unveils 'School Shield' recommendations
• Disbelief in some quarters after NRA calls for armed guards at every school, blames movies
• Defiant NRA leader rejects gun controls, asks to put police in schools

The National Rifle Association’s CEO on Thursday accused President Barack Obama of orchestrating a “charade” to dismantle gun rights in his State of the Union address this week.

Wayne LaPierre, the gun lobby group’s executive vice president and CEO, used a speech at a National Wild Turkey Federation conference in Nashville to decry the push for stricter gun laws made by Obama at the conclusion of his annual policy address on Tuesday.

“For our Second Amendment freedoms, Mr. President, we will stand and fight throughout this country as Americans for our freedoms,” LaPierre said to applause. “We promise you that.”

The gun rights advocate complained that “the words ‘school safety’ were nowhere to be found” in Obama’s address and renewed his call for funding to put an armed guard in every school in America. (Obama did speak of the need to “protect our most precious resource:  our children.”)

“It was only a few weeks ago that they were marketing their anti-gun agenda as a way of protecting schoolchildren from harm,” LaPierre said.  “That charade ended at the State of the Union, when the president himself exposed their fraudulent intentions. It’s not about keeping kids safe in school.… They only care about their decades-long, decades-old gun control agenda.”

Obama closed the speech by referencing victims of gun violence and victims’ families in attendance at his speech, forcefully repeating that those victims at least “deserve a vote” on the gun control measures proposed by the administration in the wake of the deadly December shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

"Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote," Obama said to sustained applause. "The families of Oak Creek and Tucson and Blacksburg and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence –- they deserve a simple vote."

LaPierre has been as dogged as ever, though, in resisting those proposals, taking to conservative media in recent days to make his point. Writing Wednesday for the Daily Caller, LaPierre evoked a dystopian vision of a world without guns in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Sandy in New York.

“After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia,” LaPierre wrote. “Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.”

However, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the time there were no murders committed during the storm or its very immediate aftermath.