I’ve been out of the loop for a couple of days due to a personal matter, so I missed a lot of stuff over the weekend and the early part of this week. Part of that is apparently due to a controversy up in Canada.
It seems a hockey player named Carey Price upset a bunch of anti-gunners.
The Montreal Canadiens organization and goalie Carey Price have issued apologies after Price posted a message on social media in support of a gun lobby group that recently used “POLY” as a promotional discount code.
The team issued a statement on Monday that Price didn’t know about the 1989 Polytechnique Massacre or its upcoming anniversary.
However, Price said Tuesday said he did know about the massacre and regretted the timing of his post.
Price published his initial Instagram post on Saturday, just days ahead of the massacre’s Dec. 6 anniversary. In it, Price shared his support for a lobby group, the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR), following amendments to the federal government’s gun control legislation, Bill C-21, last week.
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But the post also came a day after one of the survivors of the Polytechnique mass shooting, Nathalie Provost, denounced the CCFR for creating promotional code “POLY” offering customers 10 per cent off of merchandise.
Provost, who is also a spokesperson for the gun-control group PolySeSouvient, created by survivors of the massacre, called the discount code “incredibly disrespectful.” The code was in reference to the group.
Well, Provost needs to get over it.
The École Polytechnique massacre was a horrific incident, to say the least. 14 people plus the perpetrator were killed. It was awful and I hate that anyone had to go through that kind of loss.
But when the gun control group decided to use part of the name of that massacre in their name, they eradicated any justification they might have had for getting bent out of shape when a gun rights group uses “POLY” as a promo code, regardless of the time of year.
See, they decided they wanted to get into a fight. They could have chosen literally any other name on the planet, especially one that wasn’t tied specifically to a massacre they wanted to be held sacred or whatever,
They didn’t.
So Price passed the promo code along–a clear reference to the group and nothing else–and he doesn’t owe anyone an apology.
If PolySeSouvient didn’t want the name used in such a manner, they maybe should have considered that when selecting the name for their organization.
After all, you never see a gun control group blink when we talk about the homicide rate in gun-controlled cities. That’s not their fault and they see no reason not to attack their opponents while people are dying because of the policies they advanced.
PolySeSouvient picked up this fight. They don’t get to pretend they are above criticism and they can’t pretend the part of the massacre’s name they coopted is somehow sacred and cannot be mentioned in a particular timeframe.
That’s not how things work.
Oh, I get that they’re upset because it’s coming up on the anniversary of the massacre, and think the timeframe is wrong. Again, I don’t care. They don’t get to dictate what gun rights groups can and cannot say or how they fight these horrific and draconian restrictions.
They turned those four letters into a rallying cry for gun rights. That’s not on anyone else but them. As such, they made degraded the letters P-O-L-Y to mean gun control, which is why it was included as a promo code in the first place.
They made their bed, now they get to lie in it, and Carey Price owes nobody anything for sharing the code.
