See, it starts with some text, then some photographs.

It’s all about marketing at the largest public show of new guns in the U.S. ─ the Annual Meeting of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

As part of its ongoing research on the gun lobby and firearms industry, VPC staff have attended the NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits each year since the 1980s. The event features the largest show of new guns open to the public. 

...

The NRA and gun industry use the show in their ongoing marketing efforts targeting women, children, and communities of color ─ while working to resell the traditional market of white males with increasingly militarized firearms, such as assault weapons. 

So, when the gun-buying community is a bunch of white guys, gun ownership is racist and misogynist, but when they try to market to women, minorities, and so on, then they're evil for that?

And as someone who was in that building, I saw absolutely no marketing toward children. Their evidence for such a thing?

Some photographs of kids holding guns.

That's it. That's their evidence.

Of course, let's also note that the general public had to pay to get in there, which is how VPC got in, and where the Georgia World Congress Center was located, it's unlikely kids just wandered in, paid the entry fee, then walked around like the rest of us.

No, these kids were accompanied by their parents, who are already into firearms.

See, for all their fearmongering, they forget that while this event was open to the public, it wasn't exactly filled with things for non-gun people to do. It attracted a certain crowd and for good reason.

That's also true of the supposed marketing toward women and minorities. If they're at the NRA Annual Meeting, they're already gun people. The NRA was probably trying to get some of those people to join the organization--there was a booth where you could sign up at a significant discount--they weren't exactly marketing to people who have no interest in guns.

Because those people wouldn't darken the door.

All of this is designed to try and look insidious, but it really illustrates the difference between them and us.

See, we're fine with people not owning guns. It's the right to keep and bear arms. Not the duty to do so. I think people should, but if they don't want to, I'm not about to try and make them buy something they don't want. What do I look like, Obama, trying to push health insurance? If people want to live their lives without the means of self-defense, I hope they never come to regret that decision. The odds are likely that they won't.

But they're not good with us living our lives in our way. They want to make every action the NRA takes as evil.

The other photographs they included, which they tried so desperately to illustrate how vile the annual meeting was, was just more of the same. A rifle that was part of a "militia" series, which terrified them because they failed to remember the text of the Second Amendment, a black woman in an ad for the NRA, other women shooting rifles, things none of us even blink at because we're not broken.

My days of not taking the VPC seriously are certainly coming to a middle.