You love the Second Amendment? Good for you. It’s your Constitution and you are entitled to the protections it offers, though you would do well to remember that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Not being into guns, it’s not high on my personal list, but a few others matter a great deal to me, and so I will defend the bundle of the Bill of Rights for both of us.
When the ACLU strays from its mission of defending constitutional rights and panders to the social justice warriors, I’ve said some unpleasant things about it. While it still does good when it’s not conflicted between rights and feelz, it panders to the shallow and foolish while living off its Skokie legacy. Bad as it is, the National Rifle Association is worse.
It may love it some guns, but it loves cops more. When Philando Castile was killed for lawfully carrying a gun, the NRA’s silence was deafening. Some chalked it up to Castile being black. I chalk it up to his killer being blue. If the ACLU is conflicted, it’s nothing compared to the NRA’s conflict between the Second Amendment and police. Police win every time.
But just as the ACLU is using media to push its pandering for cash, the NRA is not to be outdone:
This is pure propaganda, taking bits and pieces of legitimate issues and spinning them into the fear-mongering threats of the Apocalypse, pushing division, fomenting violence, pandering to the most dangerous crowd, those too stupid to grasp that this is outrageous nonsense and itching for a justification to engaging in violence.
They march? They protest? They call people bad names? Oh nooooes. Does this make the NRA cry from hurt feelings? When protests have turned into to riots, whether at the inauguration or at colleges led by black-wearing Antifa, then the police have done their jobs. And then too, they do only as much as their jobs require, despite the “bully and terrorizing” rhetoric that makes the SJWs ball up in a corner and cry. So the NRA wants its members to cry in the opposing corner because they’re just as frightened and traumatized by all these scary noises?
Then comes the carefully crafted call to arms:
The only way we save our country, and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.
Fight? Fist? No allusion to violence in the streets there. And the “violence of lies”? Apparently, the NRA is carefully studying the SJWs’ claims that speech is violence so that they can turn it back on them. And after whipping its base into a freedom frenzy, it ends with every organization’s lifeblood, the call for cash. Join the NRA, the “clenched fist of truth”? This isn’t about the Second Amendment. This certainly isn’t about the Bill of Rights, about which the NRA cares nothing other than its fair-weather friendship with the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
This is about milking every stupid, pathetic fool with a little cash left in his pocket and the shallow memory of the NRA being the voice of gun owners. Just as the legacy of Skokie from 1977 is ancient history, so too is Charlton Heston’s cry that they will have to pry his gun “from my cold dead hands.”
This NRA isn’t about defending your constitutional rights. It’s about stoking fear, fomenting hatred and collecting cash.
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“They march? They protest? They call people bad names?”
They allow people who commit assault on other people to hide among them afterwards.
See Eric Clanton and Richard Spenser Nazi puncher.
I often wonder who will be so stupid as to fall for this insipid crap, and so they reveal themselves without the slightest notion of how utterly idiotic they are. Way to go, Paul.
The current state of the NRA illustrates Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It has become a den of swamp people and marketeers to whom the original mission is an afterthought.
This is evidenced by the shoddy products and services that it attempts to sell to members, along with the membership renewal notices that come every few weeks, in the hope that you can’t remember when your renewal is due.
I maintain my membership only because it’s required at the shooting range that I use, for insurance reasons.
So they still get your money. Smart. Very smart.
They get the minimum possible and what they do get is a necessary weevil. Shooting ranges are incredibly difficult to insure. In that, at least, they serve a useful purpose.
That would have been a great opportunity to use the reply button, you know.
Doh! I apologize for using the wrong reply link. Again. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Twice. Care to go for three and totally shit up my comments? Let me guess, you’re on your iToy and the darn button won’t work unless you write your comments in crayon?
I didn’t expect you to publish that but you are correct – even though I typed it before seeing your reply, I should have replied to my own misplaced comment rather than commenting de novo. Here’s where a preview button might be helpful.
I don’t have an iToy. Give Apple an inch and they’ll assimilate you, like the Borg.
Nah. I’m just screwing with you. I get to amuse myself too, you know.
I just…
Whatever happened to advocacy groups advocating for policy? I can’t even.
I wasn’t entirely surprised by the NRA being silent during the Castile incident, even if Concealed Carry is supposed to be one of their big issues. I’m even less surprised about them using fear to advocate for more $$$. I just wish they would do something useful with the $$$. I somehow doubt that’s going to happen. It’ll be used for political ads attacking people who have not gone along with their “party line” of never voting for any legislation that might be used to deny someone a firearm, no matter how legitimate their reason for denial. (Unless they’re Muslim. Can’t let them have guns)
I’d start an advocacy group in favor of sanity, but I don’t know that I’m crazy enough to want those kinds of headaches.
Money becomes the cause in itself, the mission be damned.