USA Today hoped they could smear gun rights advocates by linking them to Nazis. It was a tenuous link at best, as Ranjit pointed out quite well.

Frankly, it was one of those things that were designed to infuriate the pro-gun side of the debate and provide ammunition to the gun control crowd. The problem was that the ammunition is so weak it’s pathetic.

Regardless, you can’t let claims like that fester because someone will believe it. Gun rights groups sure aren’t ignoring it.

Gun rights organizations are taking aim at anti-gun propaganda after USA Today ran a story alleging that “Second Amendment activism can be a gateway to extremist ideologies” like the neo-Nazi movement.

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Carless further tries to prove his point by quoting Daryle Lamont Jenkins of the far-left One People’s Project, who said he went to a gun show in 1995, and “there was a guy that had a table of all kinds of weird stuff.” The article quotes multiple left-wing “experts” while asking not a single gun rights organization for balance.

Advocates of the constitutional right to self-defense strongly rebuffed the story’s central thesis. “This article is a piece of anti-gun propaganda,” the National Rifle Association’s director of media relations, Amy Hunter, told me exclusively. “The Second Amendment is part of the foundation and fabric of our country. Tens of millions of gun owners practice the safe and responsible exercise of their rights daily.”

“The Second Amendment is a gateway to personal safety, individual liberty, and a proper understanding of the Constitution,” Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, said in an exclusive statement to this author. “It’s not radical, but rather perfectly normal, to want to be armed for protection from the common thug as well as a tyrannical government.”

Both Hunter and Pratt are 100 percent correct.

And the USA Today piece was nothing more than an attempted Second Amendment hit piece seeking to smear all of us on the gun rights side of the debate as Nazis through guilt by association.

However, let’s be honest, this is going to happen again. People like the USA Today writer are looking for things to blast us for, so we need to mind our business and keep everything squeaky clean. If not, they will try and blast the entire community for it.

Then again, even if everything is above board, people like this will still try and make stuff up while downplaying anything the left has actually done.

Gun rights have nothing to do with extremism and anyone with half a brain and a desire to see the truth can find that out for themselves. While there may be extremists who also support gun rights, there are extremists who support any position you care to name on American politics. I mean, the El Paso shooter was an extreme environmentalist. Where are the pieces attacking Greenpeace as a haven for extremists?

At the end of the day, though, the gun rights community doesn’t actually expect any better from the media. We’ve seen this kind of thing time and time again and it will happen time and time again.

We just wish they could be less pathetic about it.

Then again, this is from the same publication that freaked out about chainsaw bayonets, so what do you expect?