Corporate America needs to stay out of gun debate

Glock" by mynameisgeebs is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED.

Maybe I’m telling my age here, but I remember when the American left despised corporations. They were the enemy, “The Man,” faceless entities that would destroy everything we hold dear for an additional quarter of a percentage point of profit.

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Corporate America wasn’t that evil, of course, but that’s how they made them out.

Now, though, they feel very differently about big companies. They control many of the board rooms across the nation and they can bully plenty of others.

In fact, a gun control group is trying to essentially do just that.

A group called Guns Down America is pushing a novel approach to gun control – aiming not so much at politicians, who we already know aren’t going to do anything, but instead at Corporate America.

The backdrop to this story is the latest mass shooting in America, in which a neo-Nazi armed with an AR-15 shot up an outlet mall north of Dallas over the weekend, killing eight people.

Depending on when you’re reading this, it’s likely news of another mass shooting somewhere else in America that got Google to send you here.

Mass shootings are an almost daily occurrence in modern America.

“While law enforcement still explores the motive behind this mass shooting, what is already clear is that we have too many guns in this country and they are too easy to get,” said Shannon Grady, interim executive director of Guns Down America, which was founded in 2016, in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub shooting that killed 49 and wounded 53.

Guns Down America has led successful corporate accountability campaigns that resulted in Walmart cutting back on the number of guns it sells, FedEx eliminating a discount for NRA members, and private insurance companies that were selling lucrative “murder insurance” to NRA members.

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Meanwhile, that kind of insurance is still available elsewhere and there is more to the story than presented here, Walmart is still selling guns–at least they are if you can ever find anyone in that department–and FedEx swears the ending of the NRA discount had nothing to do with guns.

What Guns Down America is trying to do is isolate gun owners and gun rights activists by trying to make Corporate America make anti-gun stands.

That’s because they think they got away with it in the past.

Yet that’s not the case today. Not necessarily, anyway.

Let’s remember that Bud Light has taken a massive beating all because they entered into a partnership deal with a controversial trans activist. In fact, they lost over a fifth of the sales volume in April. That’s a devastating blow that was delivered because of what they thought was a fairly safe bet.

Now, Anheuser-Busch has been doing damage control. Their most recent effort is to blame a third-party marketing agency for the deal.

Again, this looked like a safe bet. No one was talking about putting Dylan Mulvaney on television. At least, no one so far as I know.

What they thought was a harmless deal turned into an absolute nightmare for the company.

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Now, do you think corporate America is going to trip over itself to accommodate anti-gun whackjobs when it’s pretty well known that gun rights activists will make the beer drinkers look like Mulvaney supporters?

I wouldn’t think so.

Guns Down America is pushing for companies to do things that I believe they’ll be unwilling to do. Then again, they’re taking credit for things that had nothing to do with guns, so who knows what they think they’re doing?

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