I was ready to nail the Brady Campaign with this one, but I don’t think it’s them.  A progressive group in Ohio is piggybacking onto the shooting tragedy at Chardon High School in order to build up their mailing list. Don’t let the sympathetic words there fool you, the information they are asking for is valuable, and is meant to build up a list. While I can’t make any connection between this registrant and gun control groups, I would not be a bit surprised to find out these names will be going straight to a gun control organization. If folks out there want to start digging, this would be worthwhile if a connection could be made. Can you imagine if NRA set up an e-mail honeypot for, say, removing restrictions of guns in schools? Our opponents would be all over it, deriding the organization as monsters for so blatantly exploiting a tragedy. And you know what? They’d be right. But we’re correct to call our opponents out for their shameless exploitation.
As Thirdower points out, there’s a double standard when it comes to our opponents. It’s perfectly fine for them, leaders of the gun control movement, to exploit a tragedy for political ends. They are good guys, after all, fighting bad people like us. I’m not allowing them to get away with it. They are not good guys. The leaders of the gun control movement are horrible people, who are shameless about exploiting the tragedy of others in order to enhance their political mission and fundraising. The thoughtful and human response during a tragedy like this is thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families. I get annoyed with people on our side who are quick to jump on gun free zones even before the blood of the victims is cleaned off the floor. There will be a time for the politics, but that time has to come after the families have at least buried their loved ones.
They got $70K from the Tides Foundation in 2010. http://www.tides.org/fileadmin/user/pdf/Tides-Foundation-List-of-Grantees-2010.pdf
You know, there’s a very simple way to see if they’re harvesting email addresses: set up an email address and use it to sign up on their site, and for nothing else. Then wait. Maybe set up a bunch..
If anyone actually does this, multiple IP addresses/proxies may be useful (big assumption they’d be sophisticated enough to notice), and you’d also want to avoid following links from here on any IP you register from.
I was wondering how long it would take before the blood-dancing started.