The above Westside Armory ad, which appeared last weekend in casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, capitalized on the mindset produced by the National Rifle Association’s years of crying wolf about gun-”grabbing.” It’s pretty much a no-brainer to sell more tactical firearms by ginning up the already overflowing paranoia of America’s conspiracy cohort, which believes Hillary Clinton is going to trash the Second Amendment and leave people defenseless. After all, this worked quite effectively when Barack Obama was running in 2008 and ever since. It’s money in the bank—gun sales peaked last year.
Bloomberg ran an article about the Westside Armory in February in which store owner Cameron Hopkins admitted that “fear sells so many guns,” adding that “In the end, I guess I’m just a capitalist.”
So for the Westside Armory, it’s just a matter of raking in more Benjamins. But given we now have people showing up at political rallies with similar fully loaded firearms slung across their backs or chests, it’s not hard to imagine the darker thoughts such an ad incites among Donald Trump’s red-hatted would-be militiamen. Particularly among the ferocious few who see the Republican candidate’s refusal to say he will accept the verdict of the voters on Election Day as a literal call to arms.
The secondary message in that ad, as we know all too well, is the one that has been spread for years by the NRA. Once a respectable organization, the gun manufacturers’ lobby is now led by extremists who keep claiming—despite decades of successful lobbying for loosened gun laws—that Americans’ right to self defense is under siege.
Most people who hear that message and agree just grumble and cast their votes accordingly while perhaps buying another 1,000 rounds of ammunition. But for some fraction, dreams of armed resistance egged on by Trump’s loser tantrums could very well move from armchair fantasy to fatalities.
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Naturally, if that day comes, those in charge of the NRA and the even more fanatic Gun Owners of America will feign innocence while continuing their attack-dog propaganda campaign against political leaders who stand up to their extremist agenda. Obama was the previous target, and Hillary Clinton will be for next four to eight years.
As Clinton has made clear time after time, and again at Wednesday night’s debate, she does not oppose the Second Amendment, just tortured interpretations of how it should apply. She does not reject the right to self-defense, but, like the vast majority of Americans, favors reasonable gun reform. She wants legal changes that serve to keep firearms out of the hands of people nobody in their right mind wants armed—whether with a tactical rifle loaded with a 100-round drum or a six-shooter.