Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
If there is one thing on this planet that the Left currently hates more than Donald J. Trump, it has got to be the National Rifle Association. So, as one ought expect, the Left’s reaction to Trump speaking at the NRA’s convention in Atlanta on Friday was one of apoplectic hyperbole.
“Even as President, Donald Trump Panders to the N.R.A.” reads the headline of the New York Times editorial of April 29.
That one’s good, but the most absurd headline – and corresponding column – goes to Salon-dot-com’s Amanda Marcotte who’s “Donald Trump and the NRA: A festival of racial fear and dark fantasy,” is just asinine.
In both pieces, the authors take swipes at the gun industry as a whole, their customers, the NRA and its membership and the state of gun laws in general. What neither piece ever does is provide any real solutions to the perceived problem, or what the NRA is doing to supposedly make it worse, other than existing. The NYT editorial board seems convinced the gun industry is suffering now that Trump has been elected and people quit buying guns ahead of the expected Hillary Clinton victory; and therefore, the positions the NRA is pushing for have more to do with gun sales than gun rights – even though those positions remain unchanged from when Barack Obama was busily selling Americans more guns than Oliver Winchester did.
“Beyond that, Mr. Trump did not touch on such N.R.A. priorities as the gun lobby’s push in Congress to expand its ‘concealed carry’ campaign of gun ownership by requiring states to recognize different gun permits issued in other states. This is currently the gun industry’s main hope for a sales rebound — weakening permit laws to see more guns in more people’s pockets in more public places,” reads the penultimate paragraph of the NYT editorial.
The editors didn’t go on to draw a line from states recognizing the permits already issued to one another’s residents who already carry guns they’ve already bought, to an increase in gun sales. Instead, they opted to conclude the piece with unattributed “facts” they just made up.
“Gun safety research indicates concealed-carry gun owners are responsible for far more homicides and suicides than self-defense standoffs against criminals. But Mr. Trump, who used to favor strong gun controls, has endorsed the N.R.A.’s vigilante approach as a safety measure. ‘If I’m in that room and let’s say we have two or five or 40 people with guns,’ he hypothesized as a candidate, ’we’re going to do a lot better because there’s going to be a shootout.’”
Of course, earlier in the piece the editors floated the disingenuous number of 30,000-plus “deaths,” from firearms without bothering to mention that less than half of those are homicides. The Left’s own Violence Policy Center concluded there are some 60,000 defensive gun uses per year in the US against 9.000-11,000 firearm homicides on average, so obviously there’s simply no way the assertion tossed out by the editors of the New York Times can be even remotely true.
As absurd as the NYT piece was, the Salon piece went even deeper down the rabbit hole of Leftist insanity.
“Trump’s NRA speech was perfectly crafted to the audience of racist paranoids before him. He decried the ‘eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms’ under President Barack Obama,” she begins, not pulling any punches and cavalierly dismissing all NRA members in attendance as “racist paranoids.” The Left is allowed to paint with a broad brush, of course, because reasons.
She goes on to quote some disingenuous nonsense from Lucy McBath of Bloomberg’s anti-gun group where she insists that they’re not against people having guns, just the wrong people, like domestic abusers, the severely mentally ill and violent criminals.
“’We want to make sure we’re keeping guns out of those individuals’ hands.’” Marcotte quoted her before launching into an appeal-to-emotion about the murder of McBath’s son by someone motivated by racism, which makes it the NRA’s fault, because reasons.
That space might have been better used to actually suggest how we go about “keeping guns out of those individuals’ hands,” but, the Left has no ideas on that topic worth mentioning, so, she went with the fallacious “argument.”
“’Bottom line, this is about making sure our children and our communities are safe frrom (sic) the extremist agenda of the NRA gun lobby,’ McBath said during our phone conversation. ‘More and more people continue to die, like my child, under watered-down laws such as ‘stand your ground,’’” Marcotte wrote without bothering to point out that the murder of McBath’s son had nothing to do with any “stand your ground” defense; the murderer is in prison.
She then goes on to criticize, justly so I have to admit, the NRA’s decision to hire Bill Whittle and his dumb racist ideas for its NRATV network. She then blows this out into a three paragraph rant that concludes that the NRA is just an inherently racist organization and then guesses at the reasons for it.
“This embrace of racism could be genuine or it could be a cynical cash-grab, but either way, it’s profitable for the gun industry. In November, researchers Alexandra Filindra and Noah J. Kaplan published a paper in the journal Political Behavior demonstrating that white resentment decreases support for gun control.
Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post interviewed Filindra in April, and her comments were illuminating:
In the mind of this type of gun owner, ‘I am showing my white nationalist pride in a sort of generic way through gun ownership,’ Filindra posits. ‘This is my way of expressing my ‘more-equal-than-others’ status in a society where egalitarianism is the norm. I can’t say that some people are better and some are worse in terms of racial groups. But I can show it symbolically. I can show I’m a better citizen.’”
Just who the hell is “this type of gun owner?” I’m not sure where she’s been, but dumb people with dumb, racist ideas don’t tend to express them symbolically via guns, they just blurt them out, particularly on the internet. Could “this type of gun owner” actually exist? Maybe, but if so only in tiny numbers compared to the rest of us who just enjoy shooting sports and possessing necessary tools of self-defense.
The good news is, one doesn’t even have to look that far or hard to find evidence that neither Filindra nor Marcotte have so much as a clue as to what they’re on about.
That Salon-dot-com’s politics writer exactly no business guessing at the mindset of a gun owner, any gun owner, goes without saying; but, she doesn’t let comprehensive ignorance stop her.
“The NRA figured out a long time ago that frightened white people buy more guns. The group’s messaging and its cozy relationship to Trump makes that clear. But it’s being met with resistance from protesters who are calling for smarter gun laws, and calling on the NRA to stop peddling its radical agenda.
‘For us, it’s just about making sure everyone can live in this country freely, without the fear of being hurt, gunned down or maimed,’ McBath said.”
Again, no details are given as to what these so-called “smarter gun laws” are supposed to be; and that’s only because the Left has no ideas other than the ones that don’t work and /or have far too little political support to even try to get through committee. Instead, she just blasts away with hate-filled rhetoric, shrilly decrying in others what she herself projects: an intrinsic intolerance toward an entire demographic of people, in her case, gun owners – particularly white, male ones.
See, Trump is racist, and Trump spoke at the NRA, and the NRA employs some racists, so all NRA members are racist, and therefore all gun owners are racists, and that’s the NRA’s “racial agenda,” we’re to believe. As to what the NRA’s “extremist agenda” is supposed to be, Marcotte doesn’t say. Objectively, it would be difficult to brand the organization that lobbied hard for Project Exile – which called for stiff, mandatory sentences be applied to any criminal that used a gun in the commission of a crime – as having some sort of “extremist agenda,” which is likely why she lets these broad accusations stand unsupported.
But, we must remember that to the Left, broad-brush hatred is perfectly acceptable as long as it is directed only at approved groups, and gun owners in general and the NRA in particular is one of the few such groups orthodox Leftist dogma allows prejudice against.
The real tragedy is that these sorts of piss-and-vinegar-filled vitriolic rants against something like 100 million American gun owners and more than 13 million concealed carriers does nothing to help anyone. The Lefties who visit Salon to diddle their confirmation bias will only come away from this flaming turd of a column filled with more ignorant, self-righteous indignation at people they’ve no reason to have a quarrel with than they had before. Maybe, filled with ignorance, they’ll then go out and demand more “smart gun control laws,” be passed, which will in turn drive more people to support NRA and their efforts to keep dumb laws off the books.
Then again, as long as the Left insists on keeping the NRA not just relevant but powerful by continually aggressing upon basic human rights, people like Marcotte and the NYT editorial board will always have something to whine about.
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