It was Gun Appreciation Day on Hannity tonight. And part of showing his appreciation was to help out NRA head and gun-rights martyr, Wayne LaPierre. LaPierre has not exactly been a popular guy lately, even in right wing circles. First, he came under criticism for his press conference after the Newtown school shootings, then for his subsequent Meet the Press appearance. Now he’s under attack for the NRA ad attacking President Obama’s gun proposals. But on Hannity, LaPierre was nothing but a regular Joe standing up for the rights of America’s other regular fellas under attack by gun-hating, hypocritical elites. UPDATED: The NRA lied and got a pass from Fox.

“You’re about to be Mitt Romney-ed,” Hannity told LaPierre, thereby setting him up for martyrdom. “They’re (the Obama administration) now running a political campaign against you and your organization.”

LaPierre was part of a one-hour gun special that included a “studio audience” of all like-minded people. They applauded when LaPierre said, “The American public is going to stand and fight for their freedom and the NRA is going to stand and fight with ‘em.”

It didn’t take long to get to the victimhood. The ever-suffering Hannity said:

We use armed guards to protect our elected politicians, our presidents, our mayors, our cabinet officials. We protect money in a bank. Hollywood stars, they hire Bo Dietl (a member of the audience), right? We have at courthouses, at stadiums, office buildings, airports, aren’t they all, they all have armed guards, right? Why were people attacking you for suggesting maybe retired police officers and military be put in schools to prevent this from happening?

LaPierre is, apparently, just as much a Special GOP Victim as his host:

It was ridiculous. I mean they attack me for opposing what doesn’t work, which is one more gun law and they attack me for opposing, for supporting what does work, which is school security. I mean, what it really boils down to is the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the political elites and the media elites in this country.

Well, you can’t get much more elite than these two: $970,000-a-year LaPierre and a multimillionaire radio/TV host. But I digress.

LaPierre continued:

Most of their kids, when they go to school, they’re protected by police in the school and armed security… A third of the schools in the country have armed security right now. When President Clinton proposed it years ago. And yet Wayne says, “Let’s make people safe” and they call me crazy, they – everything under the sun. Well, I could care less because what I’m proposing will make people safe. What they’re proposing won’t.

In Part 2, Hannity played the NRA’s hideous new ad targeting President Obama and his daughters. Hannity called it a “powerful ad but yet anything the NRA points out seems to just come under attack.”

LaPierre repeated his “media elite hypocrisy” whine and added, “What’s unfair is there are Moms and Dads all over this country getting up and sending their kids to school on Monday and Tuesday of next week that are praying that their kids come home safe. And we could immediately help protect those kids by putting armed security in school, the same armed security the elites have."

Of course, neither of these two rich gun lovers offered up any thoughts as to how public schools, already struggling with budget problems, should pay for those protections for “regular” children. Nor, as Jason Linkins noted in an excellent analysis of LaPierre's post-Newtown press conference, was the phrase "private-sector solution" ever uttered here, either.

UPDATE: It turns out the NRA's ad was flat-out wrong when it said the Obama daughters' school had armed guards. Where was the Fox News fact checking?