It’s pretty amazing, given the crap I read to find something this offensive. Join me, will you?
The theme of last week’s National Rifle Association annual meeting was an odd one: maternity.
It was not an official theme in the way macho slogans like “All In” and “Stand and Fight” have formally defined recent NRA congresses. But it was a thick running thread, one that signals the quickening of a broad shift underway across the gun rights movement, from the gun makers to the grassroots.
I can see why you would think this odd, given that you consider the NRA to be a group for the gun makers, and not the people who are it’s members. Of course this whole “Corporate Gun Lobby” crap is a lie. Still you do yourself a ton of favors in the next paragraph:
For years the role of women in the politics and business of guns has been growing. We may look back at 2014 as the year it flipped. In Indianapolis, women constituted a full quarter of NRA attendees for the first time — up to a five-fold increase over the past decade, according to the group.
The NRA is pivoting quickly to adjust, and for the first time its convention program featured two major events for women. In addition to the $250-a-plate Women’s Leadership Forum Luncheon and Auction, the group held the first annual Women’s New Energy Breakfast, where female gun owners and NRA moms mixed and networked over a $15 breakfast buffet.
These same women are the target of a female-oriented media push, anchored by a running NRA web series called “Armed and Fabulous.” An early episode looks admiringly at the Potterfield women of the Midway ammunition empire, whose scion, Larry, is one of the NRA’s biggest industry donors.
So yeah, there are a ton of women in the NRA, so it’s odd for the NRA to reach out to them??? The sexism gets worse:
Red schwag set the tone. At tables throughout the complex, NRA staffers handed out “I’m an NRA MOM” buttons and t-shirts. At the building’s main entrance hung an enormous banner of a woman, looking a little pouty, next to a populist taunt of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently said he would spend big on behalf of the gun safety movement.
While it is unclear if the woman is an NRA mom, she is notably not NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre or board member Ted Nugent. The billboard captures perfectly the NRA’s double-pronged messaging campaign of the moment, best summarized as “Glocker Moms against Mayor Mike.”
That woman is Julie Golob, and she’s the woman’s captain for Team Smith and Wesson, so she uses the M&P9 over glocks. Is it a bit much to think that an anti-gun reporter covering the NRA show doesn’t know who she is? She’s pretty prominent, and yes she’s an NRA member, a Mom, a hunter, and an author. But dismiss her, that’ll do you a lot of good!
The women-and-guns motif carried over into the male-dominated dog-and-pony show known as the Leadership Forum, where 2016 hopefuls bragged about their wives’ gun racks. Rick Santorum boasted that his wife owns more guns than he does, and that his five-year old daughter is already an NRA member. Indiana Governor Mike Pence talked about falling in love with his wife for her handgun. Florida Senator Marco Rubio bemoaned the paperwork required for his female staffers to carry and conceal. And after two years in which Glenn Beck delivered the keynote, this year’s honor fell to the pistol-packin’ Mama Grizzly, Sarah Palin.
Saddly the NRA is still male dominated. We want that to stop! More and more women are shooting, and carrying defensive arms. The NRA wants them in to help grow the sports and fight against the anti-gun forces. What exactly is wrong with that?
What’s going on? The modern NRA is, above all, a thinly veiled industry group. Its “mom” offensive reflects basic gun industry economics: manufacturers’ continued growth depends in no small part on making up for the duck and deer hunting demographic, which has been static or declining for generations.
Well the 2nd Amendment is not about shooting ducks and deer. Still what’s with that “Thinly Veiled Industry Group”? How thin is this veil if only anti-gun people can see it? further from the same article:
There is also a political dimension. Following the Sandy Hook massacre, Shannon Watts opened a new front in the gun debate by founding Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America, which now claims 130,000 moms as members and chapters in all 50 states. The group’s calls for common-sense gun-reform sparked new life in a grassroots gun-reform movement that needed a boost. Last year Watts’ group merged with Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, giving it money to go with its grassroots muscle. Watts’ success created a frame that put the gun lobby on the wrong side of the gender divide.
Moms Demand Action is a direct affiliate of Michael Bloomberg’s own private political action group. This is a top-down group that has few real members, and lots of paid professional lobbyists like Ms. Watts herself. There is no “veil” here at all, Bloomberg is out and in the open about him being the king demagog against the 2nd Amendment.
Shannon Watts, the original Gun Debate Mom and an Indianapolis native, was in town for the weekend. On Saturday, she led a 300-mom strong “stroller jam” in protest a few blocks north of the convention center. On Sunday, she unveiled a Mothers Dream Quilt and released a new report, “Not Your Grandparents’ NRA.” The latter was written under the imprimatur of her new group, Everytown for Gun Safety.
I found this article of said “Stroller Jam”. Can you count more than 50 people in the picture, including men, paid activists, and personal security?
It Gets Worse!
After drawing criticism in the wake of Sandy Hook for the paranoid ranting of white male spokespeople like LaPierre, the NRA has spent the last 18 months building a diverse bench. It now employs seven commentators for its NRA News media wing, including three women (Natalie Foster, Gabby Franco, and Nikki Turpeaux), an African American (Colion Noir), and Chris Cheng, an Asian-American who has declared himself “gay for guns.”
Meanwhile, young women like CNN’s S.E. Cupp, The Blaze’s Dana Loesch, and Fox News’ Katie Pavlich regularly appear on cable news to provide the NRA’s line on the gun issue.
The NRA mom meme isn’t just a top-down thing coming from Fairfax. While strolling the gun show floor — a 40,000 square-foot maze of merchants exhibiting everything from gun insurance to fully automatic, sub-compact “greasers” — I ran into Kyle Coplen, the affable young CEO of the Armed Citizen Project, a non-profit that offers free shotguns and training to residents of high-crime neighborhoods. He was handing out his own mom-themed schwag, and said he’d been doing it for months. The shirts he designed show a female silhouette holding a child’s hand with one arm, a shotgun with the other. With a nod to shirts found in the tourist shops of South Beach and the French Quarter, it reads: “I support single moms.”
Coplen explained that he’s currently arming all kinds of moms. “We’ve trained and armed women in wheelchairs and women with special needs children,” he said. So far, his donated shotguns have all been traditional steel and wood, but he’d have no problem handing out guns in the increasingly popular hot pink. “The idea of banning pink guns is part of the liberal anti-gunners ‘war on women’,” he said.
I’d heard the same thing earlier that morning in a park opposite the convention center. There, a coalition of new pro-gun mom groups took advantage of perfect spring weather and rallied under the slogan, “Armed Moms United to Protect.” Suburban and middle-class, they were textbook Glocker Moms. There weren’t many of them, but they all seemed to have their own mom group.
Whether these groups were letterhead organizations or represented a genuine phenomenon among the brassroots is hard to say. But they do seem serious. Most have registered as 501(c)3’s and some are also functioning as PACs. The groups sponsoring the Saturday rally included Moms With Guns Demand Action, Indiana Moms Against Gun Control, and 1 Million Moms Against Gun Control. Some of them had mom-guns in their mom-jeans.
Yep any gays, blacks, or women who support the NRA are simply “Uncle Toms”, and any female activists who aren’t backed by a totalitarian billionaire could be just smoke and mirrors! And of course all this action is “top-down” action, rather than true grass roots. Why? Well all the anti-gun groups are top-down organizations, so how could a group that had a gathering of some 75,000 people in one place, all traveling at their own expense, be any different?
As the convention was winding down on Sunday afternoon, I chatted with Alan Gottlieb, the man who anticipated all of this. Gottlieb was sitting unassumingly in his trademark bowtie, signing up new members for his gun-rights group, the Second Amendment Foundation. Most NRA members have never heard of Gottlieb, but he is among the most important figures in the development of the modern gun-rights movement. His group, not the NRA, built the legal team and the strategy behind the landmark Supreme Court gun cases of McDonald and Heller, not to mention dozens of important state-level suits. Among the literature arrayed before him was the current issue of a magazine called Women and Guns, which he has been publishing since 1989. A long-term strategist, Gottlieb dismissed the “mom” boom as a silly marketing arms race and a distraction from larger trends.
“It’s not just about ‘moms,'” said Gottlieb. “The future is about all of the non-traditional groups: single women, the LGBT community, people living in cities, Hispanics who come to this country to enjoy our freedoms, including Second Amendment rights. Those are the only places we can grow. That’s where you find the future of the gun-rights movement.”
As he began packing up his materials, I asked Gottlieb if the rapid adoption of maternal messaging — by the NRA, by the Glocker Moms, by industry — might not betray a fear, or at least a nervousness, that suburban women and mothers, if unchallenged, could swing the political momentum toward serious gun reform.
“Fear? Look around,” he said, gesturing at the bustling arms bazaar extending in every direction.
“No, I really don’t think these guys are too worried about their future.”
Again, he’s fitting his interviews to his own misconceptions. Sorry, but as much as I love Alan Gottlieb, he isn’t the sole visionary to see women and shooting being the future. Groups have been around supporting women in the shooting sports and self defense for decades, just now the fruits of their labor are really starting to take off.
Why? Maybe because sexist anti-gun reporters are constantly belittling them with their sexist views of gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment. Such behavior pisses people off, and that motivates them that the treat to their freedoms is indeed real.
Anti-Gun: Pro-Criminal, Pro-Ignorance, Anti-Freedom, and anti-woman!
The fact that this horrible article was published by Media Matters shows how true this is!
