HOUSTON -- National Rifle Association leaders told members Saturday that the fight against gun-control legislation is far from over, with battles yet to come in Congress and next year's midterm elections, but they vowed that none in the organization will ever have to surrender weapons.

The debate over gun-control legislation has reached a fever pitch in the wake of December's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 first-graders and six educators were killed. The expanded background checks bill supported by President Barack Obama and other lawmakers in response to the Connecticut shooting failed to pass in the Senate.

During a fiery and defiant speech Saturday, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, the public face of the NRA, said the proposed bill "got the defeat that it deserved," adding it would do nothing to prevent the next mass shooting.

James Porter, the incoming NRA president, said Obama's gun-control efforts have created a "political spontaneous combustion" that has prompted millions of Americans to become first-time gun owners and created a national outrage that will manifest itself in next year's midterm elections.

Meanwhile, across the street, advocates of expanded background checks and other gun-control measures vowed to continue their fight.

Kellye Bowman of the Houston chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a national grassroots effort promoting gun control that started after the Sandy Hook shooting, said her group was not discouraged by last month's failure of the gun-control bill. She said its defeat increased her group's membership.

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