FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA — While controversy brews over an op-ed that The National Rifle Association promoted on its various social media platforms that fantasized about agents of the “radical left” being executed after a Civil War that breaks out in America over gun rights, the NRA itself is putting a spokesman forward to explain why this story was promoted as suggested reading material for its members.
“This story was sent out merely as a suggestion,” NRA sub-executive junior spokesman Cash Gachette told reporters outside the gun manufacturer lobbyist’s Fairfax, Virginia headquarters early this week, “not a warning.” Gachette told reporters that his employers “of course don’t advocate murdering people because they are in favor of gun control,” but rather, “only after the inevitable second Civil War breaks out after we’ve stoked the paranoia of gun zealots everywhere.”
According to Gachette, he and the NRA executives “most definitely want” to “find a solution to our gun problem that doesn’t end in a war between gun nuts and citizens who just want common sense gun reforms put in place,” but that “the sinister liberal, gun grabbing agenda of the president and his other thugs” is preventing that. “So what other choice will the country have than to start murdering each other over our right to have completely unfettered and unchecked access to implements of murder? I mean, are you really suggesting we could be adults, bring our differences to the table, hash out the stuff we can’t ever agree on, and then just work on solutions we could agree on,” Gachette said.
The article, written by conservative blogger and gun rights activist Bob Owens, proposed a hypothetical scenario in which liberals “impose their ideas on the American people” in regards to gun legislation, and then those liberals are met with extreme, deadly force from “armed free citizens.” The imagined conflict between gun rights activists and their foes ends in the gun rights groups’ favor, and a photo of a hangman’s gallows is featured on the piece with the caption, “This is where the survivors of the Democratic rebellion will meet their end.”
Reporters asked Gachette if the NRA would be comfortable with a group like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence promoting an article from a liberal blogger that fantasizes about gun rights activists being hung after a Civil War. “Of course not,” was how Gachette answered, and when pushed for a further explanation said emphatically, “shall not be infringed.” Reporters then asked Mr. Gachette if he would be alarmed or concerned if he were a Democrat by the NRA’s promotion of Owens’ piece. “No, of course not,” Gachette said, “because a) I’d never be a Democrat and b) if I was, I’d be one of the good ones that knows that the point of America is for everyone to own massive piles of firearms and really, not much else.”
“All we meant to do by promoting that amazing piece by Mr. Owens,” Gachette said as he ended the press conference, “was to suggest to our members that voting isn’t the only option they have if they feel like — no matter what the facts say — that liberals are coming to take their guns away. We were just suggesting that maybe it will come to a point where our paranoia pushes us to determine that instead of making reasoned arguments for why it makes sense to not really check all that carefully into who is getting a gun, we need to make war with liberal Democrats. That’s not a threat, or a warning,” Gachette said, “just a suggestion to not take any option off the table.”
“Including murdering your fellow American citizen because they disagree with your view of the Second Amendment, of course,” Gachette said as he thanked the reporters and walked away.
