NRA heroism: Disparaging kids’ anti-gun campaign as ‘civil terrorism’

Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Medgar Evers … they had it easy compared to the travails suffered by the NRA.

Sure, civil rights heroes were confronted with clubwielding cops in Alabama, the KKK in North Carolina, assassins in Mississippi. But they weren’t subjected to withering attacks on social media. They weren’t up against the likes of the #neveragain kids.

“They call them activists. That’s what they’re calling themselves. They’re not activists — this is civil terrorism,” Oliver North complained to the Washington Times in a May 9 interview.

North, the newly anointed president of the National Rifle Association, described how the NRA has been the object of a social media campaign led by young student survivors of the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.

The Parkland students convinced retail chains like Dick’s Sporting Goods to stop selling assault weapons. “We love these kids and their rallying cry ‘Enough is enough.’ It got to us,” Dick’s CEO Edward Stack told the New York Times. Walmart quickly followed suit. And in March, the global banking giant Citi announced that it would no longer service retail clients unless they refrained from selling guns without background checks, stopped offering bump stocks or high capacity magazines, and prohibited gun sales to anyone under 21.

Just last week, Florida’s largest supermarket chain was scrambling to disassociate itself from the NRA after the Tampa Bay Times reported that Publix and its top executives have donated $670,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of “proud NRA sellout” Adam Putnam. After Miami filmmaker Billy Corben tweeted the story with the hashtag #BoycottPublix, it was retweeted by Parkland student activist David Hogg (with 787,000 Twitter followers) with the words that must have enraged Oliver North: “Guess I’ll be getting my chocolate chip muffins elsewhere from now on.”

“This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” North said. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things — even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”

It’s a bit startling, comparing the civil rights movement to the NRA’s uncompromising push to utterly deregulate guns, even military assault weapons. But North’s complaints fit nicely with the NRA’s great motivation device, the dissemination of mendacious paranoia.

Remember those eight years of hyperbolized warnings about President Obama’s secret plan to ban and confiscate privately owned firearms?

Remember how Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s crazy-talk executive vice president, warned that the presidential election of 2012 would be “the most dangerous election in our lifetime”?

The NRA rallies its members with “they’recoming-to-take-your-gun-away.” It’s how gun manufacturers, the NRA’s financial benefactors, scare up gun purchases. (The Obama-asthe-great-gun-seizing-Satan strategy brought the firearms industry record sales.) It’s how the NRA motivates members to call, email, harangue, threaten politicians who fail to follow the gun lobby’s legislative dictates.

North, who became a right-wing anti-hero after orchestrating the illegal Iran-Contra gun running scheme during Reagan administration, is waging yet another variation of the smear campaign the far-right fringe has waged against the #neveragain kids since the Parkland massacre.

The survivors have been besmirched as fake students, as “crisis actors” hired to fake a massacre in some bizarre government plot. Or, among more rational conservatives, as pawns who’ve been exploited by left-wing propagandists. “Do we really think 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” asked former Georgia congressman and CNN commentator Jack Kingston as he contemplated hundreds of thousands of #neveragain demonstrators flooding the streets of American cities on March 24.

Apparently, mainstream Republicans, if such creatures still exist in the age of Trump, have decided that it’s OK to disparage massacre survivors. Just as the Florida Republican Party decided it was OK to feature far-right provocateur (and convicted felon) Dinesh D’Souza at the party’s Sunshine Summit next month in Orlando. The party embraced D’Souza despite his tweets in February mocking a photo of distraught Parkland students after the Florida House voted down an assault weapon ban. “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs,” D’Souza wrote. He added: “Adults 1, kids 0.”

Yet, D’Souza’s invitation stands. Too hell with the Parkland survivors.

Somehow, despite their ever-so-courageous attacks on the #neveragain kids, it’s hard to think of D’Souza and North and other minions of the NRA as modern day civil rights heroes. But maybe that’s just me.

Fred Grimm