Title of this post is according to Jason Whitlock, who was the author of the original piece that got Bob Costas in trouble. Our opponents in the gun control movement are salivating about this recent rhetoric, but in truth, this is the kind of coverage NRA feeds off of, because people who are even remotely inclined to side with NRA get galvanized by it. I know this is hard for many people in the gun control movement to understand, but suggesting people who enjoy shooting and value the Bill of Rights are the moral equivalent of a domestic terrorist organization bent on enforcing the kind of racial policy only Hitler could be proud of, tends to upset people enough to get more seriously involved:
You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture — I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].
That’s crazy tin foil hat stuff right there. What they fail to understand that there are a lot of gun owners, shooting enthusiasts, and other people inclined to our point of view who have better things to do, ordinarily, than to get themselves involved in a political scrap. Any hateful rhetoric such as this, is enabling for an activist. It brings people in, causes them to seek out kindred spirits, gather information, and makes them pay attention. It opens to them the idea that the only way to crush the hateful is political engagement. They begin to understand that people like this can not be compromised with. In short, it makes my job as an activist much, much easier.
Ok, even if we accept the most japeted vision of the NRA- how exactly are they “loading up our communities with drugs”?
Well, the gun grabbers certainly believe in all manner of mystical and magical powers of guns and gun ownership….
So, why doesn’t the NRA sue for libel? Especially the drug assertion seems easily disprovable and worthy of a couple million to me.
Because then NRA would be the bad guy. Think the media is going to give NRA a fair shake if they sue a critic?
Excuse my Old Norse, but fuck that. You don’t win in politics by sweating over being made the bad guy. As the recently departed Larry Hagman proved as J.R., being the bad guy makes you more popular, if anything. It’s when you are seen as weak that you lose.
You don’t win politics by fighting battles you can’t win either. There’s very little to be gained with a libel suit, which are notoriously hard to win. You can basically say anything you want about public figures. You can say the Brady Campaign is the new KKK. They can say NRA is the new KKK. Even if you won the suit, what do you gain really? It’s not really something I view as part of NRA’s mission to fight and win libel suits against it. I’d consider it a distraction, and one who’s only result is going to be negative media attention.
Agreed on libel suits, but there are other things you can do. For instance, a private investigator could be hired to investigate Jason Whitlock’s and Bob Costas’s personal lives, and the results could be publicized.
1) Bad PR.
2) It’s not clear that he’s actually trying to say “the NRA sold/promoted drugs”, rather than that of unnamed people who include but are not limited to the NRA. In other words, I think he’s lumping the NRA in with a Generic Anti-Black Conspiracy.
3) Generally that’d all be defensible as “opinion” or “mere abuse”.
4) It’s farkin’ impossible to win a libel suit in this country unless the statement is absolutely clear and plainly false, ideally also deeply offensive (defamation per se) – and it’s hard to say what would count as defamation per se against a activist group.
And to clarify, 2(b) combined with (1): Suing crazy people makes you look bad.
Funny thing is, there are many Leftists out there who sincerely believe that the NRA is the old KKK. They saw Michael Moore’s misleading and indecent commentary on that in his film and were too stupid to check their sources.
(FYI, there was a reason that the NRA and KKK both originated around the same time. Both were formed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The difference was that the NRA was formed by former Union soldiers, and the KKK was formed by former Confederate soldiers).
Michael Moore is just another one of those disingenuous, lying sack of s–t limousine liberals. I have known this for years, but my latest way of knowing is this:
I recently was able to work with a Cuban guy who is in his late 40’s now. He told me how he and other family members of his all left Cuba when he was 17. He told me how Cuba allowed them all to go to Panama, but about a month later they made their way to Miami, Florida from there instead of going back to Cuba. (They basically had to con their way out of their own nation, the so-called worker’s paradise, but that was their plan all along.)
So then I asked my Cuban colleague if he has seen Michael Moore’s “Sicko” movie. He told me that he has seen it, and that this movie’s depiction of health care in Cuba for everyday Cubans was nothing but a total distortion of the truth. He told me that the best health care in Cuba is only available to Cuba’s Communist Party elites and foreigners who can pay for their treatment in foreign cash, and that the “free” health care in Cuba for everyday Cubans is not even fit for dogs and cats in industrialized nations. For me, this should help to explain why for years, some desperate Cubans have been building rafts out of whatever they thought would float and then traversing over 90 miles of shark-infested waters just to reach dry land in Florida.
As a denizen of the City of Kansas, please allow me to apologize for Jason Whitlock. His sports reporting is every bit as enjoyable as his firearms coverage.
On a somewhat related note, I read all of the Yahoo News stories related to firearms just so I can read the comments and see which way the wind blows. The comments related to the Whitlock/Costas hubbub are FIRMLY on the 2A side. I didn’t see a single popular comment in support of Whitlock or Costas.