Ripping the National Rifle Association has been a common theme coming from Daily Beast contributing writer Cliff Schecter. (Try his rants that they protect "homicidal maniacs" or are "treasonous and murderous.") This time, however, Schecter took a new angle, criticizing the gun-rights organization for their silence regarding the ongoing protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri. (Silence? Somehow, he leaves out NRANews.com, which is actively talking about it.)
Schecter barely hid his suggestion that the NRA is nothing more than a bunch of gun-toting racists. He argued that “the NRA professes no kinship for those being crushed beneath the jackboots [in Ferguson]. It seems the NRA is only worried about the civil rights of white people.”
Others among the group have supported Apartheid, wished the South had won the Civil War and called African-American culture inferior, among other things. None have performed in blackface to my knowledge, but the decade is still young.
The gun control advocate suggested that the NRA “has been warning us about the threat of a heavily-armed and dangerous government crushing dissent for decades.” He believes the NRA is being hypocritical for not backing the protestors in Ferguson because this is – in his eyes – an example of the government acting in a tyrannical manner against its citizens.
After citing some purportedly minor incidents in which the NRA involved itself, Schecter wondered how the Ferguson protests and the aggressive response from police didn’t make the cut:
The National Rifle Association often claims it is “America’s longest standing civil rights organization” but apparently these minor issues were more important than the murder of an unarmed teen by a policeman, and the subsequent attacks by a militarized force on unarmed Americans in a U.S. city.
Schecter leaves out that the facts of the Michael Brown shooting are still largely unknown. He doesn’t mention that the police have been fired upon by protestors or that Molotov cocktails have been thrown in their direction. The NRA has good reason to wait before commenting on a situation that is still unfolding.
