After Obama, NRA reloading message
Pity the poor National Rifle Association.
When President Obama left the White House in January, the NRA lost its boogeymen. For more than eight years, the NRA told anyone who would listen that “Obama is coming to take your guns!” Of course, there was no truth to the group’s fearmongering, but the NRA learned a long time ago that its audience, many of whom have chosen to live in a non-fact-based bubble, would lap up a suggestion the guy in the White House – who might or might not be a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist, wink, wink – was preparing to send in black helicopters filled with jackbooted, one-world-order thugs to disarm them.
But now President Obama is a former president, and the NRA has a friend in the White House. So, how to keep those gun sales booming and those NRA memberships rolling in? Just pick out new “targets” that your audience already distrusts and loathes. The NRA has chosen “elites” and the news media.
In a recently released video called “Taking on the Times,” the NRA claims the “elites … threaten our very survival.” The words are delivered by new NRA mouthpiece Dana Loesch, a conservative political commentator who perhaps could best be described as the Tokyo Rose of the pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-fingers crowd.
In the video, she grimly intones, “The times are burning and the media elites have been caught holding the match.”
She specifically targets The New York Times, saying “We’ve had it with your narratives, your propaganda, your fake news. We’ve had it with your constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe is real life. And we’ve had it with your tone-deaf assertion that you are in any way truth- or fact-based journalism. Consider this the shot across your proverbial bow. … In short, we’re coming for you.”
In short, it’s hysteria as only the NRA can do it.
The Times certainly is no friend of the right, but to suggest it is in the business of habitually printing untruths on its news pages as part of some left-wing plot is foolishness. Studies, such as one by PolitiFact, have shown the major U.S. news organization most likely to dispense outright lies and twist the truth is Fox News, but its politics are “right,” so apparently it is exempt from any NRA “truth critique.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press the tone and language of the NRA video is “overwrought rhetoric” and the “We’re coming for you” phrase “means that violence is imminent and we will perpetrate it.”
The NRA, of course, would say that’s the wrong interpretation, but its statement certainly can be taken in different ways by different people. What if the message is received by a person who is unhinged and prone to violence? The result could be tragic, though history tells us that the NRA would not be the least bit apologetic.
Most likely, the main goal of the NRA video is to keep those memberships coming and to keep those guns flying off the shelves. There was a time when the NRA primarily represented hunters and sportsmen, but those days are long gone. The NRA now does the bidding of weapons manufacturers, and say what you will about the NRA, they do an excellent job of making sure their key clients prosper.
But let’s not kid ourselves about the reality of the “threat” to gun ownership. If Congress couldn’t enact minor controls on the flow of weaponry after 20 schoolchildren were killed in Newtown, Conn., a few liberal editorials really shouldn’t be much of a concern.