How does the NRA view you?

Below is a scan of the cover sheet the NRA sends to all MN candidates.

The header image above indicates, in bold print no less, what they think of you as a fellow citizen, and thereby a co-owner of the 2nd Amendment, if you don’t agree with them in their attached questionnaire.

Grandma used to say “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar” but the NRA starts off with the vinegar. They don’t use some honey until the opening line of the next paragraph.

If you don’t respond they tell you outright you could be considered hostile towards the 2nd. It is lost on them that making such a threat itself pretty much indicates they already are hostile themselves but in their case to their fellow citizens.

So they issue a threat, that would be the vinegar Grandma talked about.

Subsequently they pull out the sugar in the form of “I respectfully request…”. That would be the honey Grandma mentioned.

Oh good, now they’re being all sweet and nice. Didn’t even need to shout “Don’t shoot, I’m unarmed.”

This is how the NRA treats their fellow co-owners of the 2nd Amendment. Threateningly.

If you don’t agree with them you’re hostile. Pot calling the kettle black as you know who used to say.

I suppose the parents in Sandy Hook may be hostile now. Not sure, they do manufacture guns out that way, but a reasonable assumption is about 26 families out there may indeed have cause to be hostile towards the NRA.

So what is the NRA?

In short it is a shill for the gun manufacturers. And those manufacturers probably need the NRA since with ~300 million firearms already in the country they must be close to what is called market saturation.

But publicly they claim to be the face of sportsmen. Of late they’ve picked up the outliers too, the castle doctrine types.

They tell their members the government is coming for their guns. Oooh, another threatening tone there.

They tell their members the 2nd Amendment is under assault. Can’t recall any motion to repeal it but there might be one coming so better gin up the base with some more threatening verbiage.

Dead kids? Guns didn’t kill ’em, people did. Yes that’s true, people did… with guns.

Nowhere is there any admission on their part that the 2nd belongs to all of us. Even the folks without firearms in their homes own the 2nd Amendment. They own it every bit as much as the person with those 10,000 rounds squirrelled away.

And in truth, if any branch of the military showed up to disarm them just how many of those 10,000 rounds do you think they’d get off before their demise?

Not too many based on the recent rash of school killings. Seems like even when the other side is unarmed there is some limit to how many shots a shooter will get off. The shooter always dies with lots of spare ammo.

It was amusing to read where the military was having some trouble getting ammo for the current conflicts after the 2nd defenders, as they identify themselves, gobbled up every grain they could get their hands on. How American is that? Country’s at war and they suck up the ammo supply. Real smart thinking there, real smart.

Military goes off to defend a nation’s constitution and the NRA promotes sucking up the ammo to do just that mission. Really kind of stupid on the NRA’s part when you think it through. Grandma would couch that as “Getting the cart before the horse.”

But that amendment is yours and that amendment is mine; harkening back to the birth of the nation when the frontier was just beyond the Cumberland gap and the whites were land grabbing and displacing the first nations’ peoples.

My bloodline was there, in what is now West Virginia. Being descendant from the families in Border Settlers, Northwestern Virginia, McWhorter, and Chronicles of Border Warfar“, Withers, there is a thing or two I know about this period of history. It was the Scot-Irish that Washington knew would fight and they very much liked their guns.

It was a time when community defense relied on a local militia to thwart or inflict reprisal towards the indigenous peoples. They have been subdued, that is for certain. And now as they rise again with casinos the white world wants in on the action. Yet another attempt at subjugation, this time not over land but over money itself. More white people in those casinos than any other group.

But the 2nd defenders found a rebirth. First with the sportsmen, and later with the outliers.

So the new threat, and presumably just as scary, is your fellow citizen, ergo the castle doctrine. The very citizens who also can lay claim to the 2nd even if they don’t support the NRA.

Your fellow citizen may try to harm you, possibly with a gun (which as you recall doesn’t kill people), so best to threaten every politician running for office with an implied “hostile” label. [Reminder: the native peoples were once considered hostiles too]

The NRA probably doesn’t think much of you since they start off with the vinegar in the form of a threat, at least that’s what Grandma taught me.

It’s about time the broader coalition of 2nd Amendment owners puts the NRA in its place. They seem to understand threats and that’s what it’s gonna’ take.

No point in sugar coating it, just open up wide and take your medicine NRA.

 

 

Epilogue:

I received one of these letters myself in 2012. Got one from Rothman with MN gun crazy too. Didn’t fill out either one. Instead I turned the damned thing over and wrote out long hand that having lost a son in Afghanistan I already had and still do defend the 2nd Amendment and the NRA can go to hell. It’s mine too, every bit, if not more than theirs. I don’t care what their view is of me. Maybe they should have tried some honey.