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Progressive writer admits real reason for anti-gun lawsuits

AP Photo/Haven Daley

The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in our Bill of Rights. While it’s been a bumpy road, the last several Supreme Court cases on the topic have firmly come down and made it clear that only minimal restrictions on that right can be tolerated.

What that means is that anti-gun progressives who want to infringe on our rights have to look at another way to do that.

Unfortunately, they’ve long had one. They tried lawsuits, then the PLCAA was passed to block that.

Yet a progressive writer at a progressive publication argues that the recent verdict against Alex Jones may provide a roadmap against gun companies, and he makes it clear what he wants to do. After all, it’s titled, “Does the Alex Jones Civil Verdict Show Us How to Bankrupt the Gun Industry?”

And the body doesn’t get much better.

lthough Alex Jones is attempting to protect himself from a recent civil court verdict (for compensatory and punitive damages) of nearly $50 million by declaring bankruptcy for his main propaganda business, more civil suits are in the pipeline. Furthermore, if the civil suit he lost last week for defamation is successful after appeals, along with others filed against him, he may indeed become bankrupt, even if he is raising money through other vehicles than his parent company right now.

Jones was sued for propagating the cruel lie that the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012 was actually a false flag operation perpetrated to try to pass more gun control. The result has been a merciless and ceaseless series of verbal attacks, doxxing and harassment against the parents of children who died in the school. Jones’s statements were heinously harmful to those who were already living with the grief of a child being shot and killed in a classroom.

Civil suits are about attacking the pocket books of defendants, and they can be filed when a criminal suit doesn’t apply.

The gun industry learned of the danger of such suits based on the charge that gun manufacturers were and are knowingly excessively manufacturing guns for potential killers, and that they are specifically designing and marketing guns to appeal to the young, deranged, non-sports shooter based on firepower and style, as if they were selling the latest season’s cars.

Except, there’s no reason to even suspect that the gun industry believes any such thing. Yes, guns can be misused, but we also know that those manufacturers aren’t selling directly to criminals. All of their sales go through FFL holders, which means everyone gets a background check before the sale can go through.

Considering what advocates of such measures claimed when these were passed, why wouldn’t they believe they were doing enough?

Yet it’s clear the goal of such lawsuits is to essentially destroy the firearm industry in this country, all because they don’t personally approve of the private ownership of firearms.

Which, of course, we knew, but it’s always nice when they confirm it for us.

If it were merely about punishing irresponsible actions by the industry, this isn’t the language they’d use. They wouldn’t talk about bankrupting an entire industry.

But they are.

What’s more, their claims are nonsense. Yes, the marketing is meant to appeal to people. That’s what marketing is for.

However, these efforts to attack the marketing continue to fail to illustrate any link between the marketing and the bad actors themselves in any of these lawsuits. After all, gun marketing isn’t exactly on mainstream television or your average YouTube ad. For the marketing to have any impact, someone would have to actually see that marketing, and yet that link never gets shown.

That’s because that link typically just doesn’t exist.

The only “marketing” that most of these killers see is the “marketing” done by the mainstream media, which shills for people like the author and pushes the idea that such weapons cannot be stopped and are the preferred choice of mass shooters, even though they’re not.

But somehow, we don’t see CNN getting lawsuits. Weird, ain’t it?