Florida school shooting fallout
Student protests force more companies to cut ties with National Rifle Association |
T he fallout over last week’s shooting rampage at a Florida high school started to take its toll on National Rifle Association’s roster of corporate partners on Friday as a half dozen companies severed marketing ties with the gun advocacy organisation.
The exodus of corporate names, ranging from a major insurer to car rental brands and a household moving company, occurred after the NRA launched a counter-offensive against a student-led campaign for tighter US gun ownership laws.
At the same time, gun control activists are stepping up pressure on Amazon.com Inc and other online streaming platforms to drop the online video channel NRATV, featuring gun-friendly programming produced by the NRA.
Mums Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, founded after 20 first-graders were shot and killed at a Connecticut school in 2012, sent letters to Apple Inc, AT&T Inc, Amazon, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Roku Inc on Friday, asking them to drop NRATV from their platforms.
“We have been just disgusted by NRATV since its beginning,” Shannon Watts, founder of the Mums Demand Action group, said. “It tries to pit Americans against one another, all in an attempt to further their agenda of selling guns.”
Renewed debate
AT&T said it does not carry NRATV. None of the other companies immediately responded to requests for comment.
The issue of gun control, and the NRA’s role in opposing it, became the focus of renewed national debate on February 14, when a former student killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, with an AR-15 assault rifle he had purchased legally.
The US Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right of Americans to bear arms. The NRA, which has long used campaign donations and effective lobbying to command political influence, argues that stricter gun control would erode individual rights.
The group has not commented on companies cutting ties.
Angry student survivors of the shooting have confronted politicians from state lawmakers to US President Donald Trump himself, demanding stricter gun control laws.
Incentives
In response, the NRA and Trump have suggested arming teachers who have received training to deter attackers, a proposal that has been met with scepticism by teachers unions and gun violence experts.
Before the corporate defections, nearly two dozen companies nationwide had offered incentives to NRA members, according to ThinkProgress. com, a news site owned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The attrition started late Thursday when three rental car brands owned by Enterprise Holdings Inc said they were ending discount programmes, and First National Bank of Omaha said it would not renew the NRA’s contract to issue a co-branded Visa card.