Saw an article today saying that Dick’s Sporting Goods will no longer sell military-style firearms, and their company policy going forward is that they will not sell any sort of gun to someone under age 21. I’ve never shopped there, but may in the future.
You might want to wait a bit. Dick’s did the same thing in 2012 after Sandy Hook. A year later, they were selling them again.
Exactly. This could just be some temporary bandwagon-hopping, but I still see it as a positive sign of growing anti-NRA sentiment.
I’m very happy the NRA is showing its backside right now because their craven entitlement is making it obvious they are the number one impediment to our progress. They would rather we contort ourselves as a society to accommodate guns and the maniacs addicted to them rather than employ sensible regulation. Why should any of us accept this nonsense? They are also telling us that gun availability is more important than all of other freedoms–namely, the freedom to live without being mowed down by a 20 year old. How does this logic benefit the average person, though? It only benefits those who get rich from gun sales.
If the key to shifting our culture is making it so being an NRA member is almost as eyebrow-raising as being in NAMBLA, then I’m all for that.
“Dick Sporting Goods had cut off sales of assault-style weapons at Dick’s stores after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. But sales had resumed at its smaller chain of Field & Stream stores. On Wednesday, Stack said that would end, and he called on lawmakers to act now.”
Do you have a cite that they were selling them other than in the F&S stores?
No. Is there an important difference between Dick’s and a subsidiary? It appears that Dick’s opened F&S and broke their 2012 promise.
It benefits the people who demand ideological purity from their party as a moral test, and will hurt people on “their side” who “sell out” in order to become more popular worse than they hurt people they never saw as allied to begin with.
The GOP is hamstrung by the NRA, and the NRA is hamstrung by the Gun Nation types who will defect and form a new organization if they see the NRA as selling out the cause of freedom just because there was another school shooting. These people will marginalize the NRA into irrelevance if they’re allowed to, as we can see happening as we speak, and the NRA will have to accept some short-term pain if it’s going to shed the lunatics and become the voice of gun owners who perhaps don’t want to turn public schools into armed camps run on the Auburn System.
Right-wingers have taken to whining about “virtue signaling”, or taking positions purely to identify status within a social group. This is one of a long line of things everyone does which the Right wants to demonize, so they can virtue signal by calling out all of the Lefties who do them. In this case, the NRA is virtue signaling so hard they’re advocating turning schools into prisons, and they’re signaling their virtue to the only people who’d consider such action virtuous: The extremist types who view their ownership of firearms as being a defining trait more important than their citizenship in the country they live in, to the point they threaten armed revolt whenever their gun ownership is threatened, which I refer to as Gun Nation.
The NRA has the option to prevent this, by shedding Gun Nation and, essentially, turning back the clock to when it was more about hunters and competitive shooters who could accept a functional regulatory framework without feeling the need to threaten treason. Gun Nation will never allow that, and will never reform. If the NRA does force Gun Nation out, the group Gun Nation forms will indeed be NAMBLA-like in its unpalatability.
I wonder what the NRA will have to say about this?
Trump says he told NRA leaders that it’s time to “stop this nonsense”
The NRA is Gun Nation. The more moderate members would be better off if they broke from the organization, unless they want be painted with the same brush as the extremists and scorned.
The question is, how long until thump backtracks and denies he ever said anything?
Yep he will ignore he ever said it. He’s just waiting for the next crises in his administration so he can ignore that as well.
Now that was a dick move…
Soon, I’m sure. I probably should have posted the reporting on today’s meeting in the CF thread.
No prob. It’s all blurring together anyway. At least it is in my head.
For the most part, it’s already happened. They’ve been hovering under 5m paid members annually; they’ll lose a few more, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume most of those won’t worry too much about scorn. They pretty much are the extremists.
Walmart is also raising its minimum age for purchase of firearms to 21. Walmart had stopped selling AR15 style rifles in 2015.
Raising the minimum age from 18 to 21 doesn’t strike me as all that significant, but maybe it will move the conversation a little in the right direction.
Now, if we just had a president who was committed to confiscating guns without due process, we’d really be getting somewhere!
No, the SAF and GOA folk are more extreme.
Translation: We bought him fair and square, and we expected him to remain bought.
Small thread derail, but we’re never going to make significant progress as a nation until news anchors stop pretending that campaign contributions are anything less than legal bribes.
The NRA seems to think it’s catastrophically significant.
Oh, no doubt they are. I’m just suggesting those Americans who are currently NRA members are more likely to find common cause with groups like those than with mainstream America at this point.
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