Anti-Gun Outrage Over American Rifleman Cover

Earlier today, I discussed how the anti-gun media will latch onto anything they can to paint pro-gun activists as violent thugs.

To give you another example, we have the National Rifle Association (NRA). Now, the NRA doesn’t trip over its own junk on a day-to-day basis. In fact, it didn’t here, either. However, an anti-gun media, coupled with anti-gun lawmakers, will manipulate anything they can to paint that picture.

Advertisement

On its latest issue of American Rifleman, the words the NRA uses to discuss anti-gun policies proposed by congressional Democrats are araising all kinds of a stink.

The NRA magazine The American Rifleman’s March 2019 cover has set off the left. (See update at bottom of article.) Democrats have a short fuse in the gun rights debate anyway, but the current outrage is particularly unserious. The cover features a photo op Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, including former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, took when Pelosi spoke about universal background check legislation Democrats are putting up for a vote next week. Next to that photo is the NRA’s wording – “Target Practice” with the subtitle “Congressional Democrats target gun owners for persecution with extreme firearm transfer bans.”

Former Rep. Giffords was nearly killed by a gunman’s attack while doing a meet and greet with her Arizona constituents in a grocery store’s parking lot on Saturday morning in 2011. Six people died in that mass shooting. As she recovered, she and her astronaut husband and Democrat political activist Mark Kelly formed a PAC to push stronger gun control laws. Now Kelly is running for the U.S. Senate to represent Arizona.

To those of us that are not hysterical about gun ownership, the cover is not incendiary. To the gun-grabbing Democrats in Congress, though, this is an attempt by the NRA to incite violence against the most powerful legislator in the country, as California Rep. Eric Swalwell described Pelosi.

Advertisement

This, of course, is unsurprising.

You see, you can have Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) explicitly threaten harassment of administration officials, and it’s nothing for the media. It’s a non-event. However, the moment you use the words “Target Practice” in a headline–despite the subtitle making it very explicit who is being targeted–they’ll latch onto the claim that this is a threat.

Perhaps the best hot take was this one:

Says the man who threatened to nuke gun rights supporters. Honestly, he’s the last person who needs to lecture anyone on supposed “calls for violence.”

Swalwell then doubles down by saying the NRA should face legal consequences, but anyone with half a brain would know that the subtitle alone would get the charges thrown out of court. After all, it’s saying we’re the damn targets, you freaking moron! It’s not saying to target anyone, but arguing that shots (metaphorically) are being fired at us.

Advertisement

But Swalwell is making his name on violent rhetoric while hypocritically trying to label the NRA as violent.

He’s not alone, either. Not by a longshot.

Yet through it all, they forget one thing. This is a mind over matter situation. We won’t mind them because, well…they don’t matter.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Advertisement
Advertisement