Guess Who Wins When It’s MOMS Versus The NRA.
Who does Gun-nut nation fear more than anyone else? Who
is the one person who represents Armageddon when it comes to all those beloved
gun ‘rights?’ It’s not Hillary, it’s not Bloomie, it’s not those twenty-odd
Presidential wannabes vying for the attention of blue-team donors like me.
It’s a little lady from Indiana named Shannon Watts,
whose organization, Moms Demand Action
for Gun Sense in America, represents a real threat to the nonsensical
narratives about the role of guns in American society peddled by various
pro-gun noisemakers and their friends on the alt-right.
This gang of fools launched an organized assault on
Shannon last week, which started after Shannon posted a tweet criticizing the NRA‘s announcement that they would continue to fight
against regulations that ban ‘armor-piercing’ ammunition since, according to
America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’ all centerfire ammunition will
pierce ‘soft’ body armor. As soon as Shannon’s post went up (and btw, the NRA‘s statement about the lethality of
‘all’ centerfire rifle ammunition is totally and completely full of sh*t) the
boys in Fairfax responded with posts on Instagram, telling
their supporters to send negative comments to Shannon. This resulted in a
flurry of threats, insults and profanity which has become the staple of how the
alt-right deals with anything that even remotely smacks of gun control.
Once the semi-literates who flock to Instagram started
going after Shannon, the big boys and girls on the alt-right weighed in with
more. Breitbart got in on the act, so did Townhall. And just to makes sure that the
alt-right audience wouldn’t miss a trick, the NRA named Shannon as ‘Bloomberg’s chief lobbyist.’ Why not try to
kill two birds for the price of one, right?
Not that Shannon has ever been anything other than a
pain in the you-know-what to Wayne-o and the rest of the NRA gang, but I
suspect that maybe, just maybe, her tweet about armor-piercing ammunition may
have given the boys from Fairfax exactly the issue they needed to avoid
discussing another threat to the organization’s leadership which has just
cropped up. I am referring to a pile of documents anonymously leaked to the internet, which are letters
sent to the NRA Counsel, raising
questions about payments made to a law firm, as well as expenses run up by
Wayne-o himself while allegedly engaged in travel activities for the NRA.
Most of
the latter charges were for clothing bought at a clothing boutique, Ermenegildo
Zegna, where a polo shirt can run as much as $495 bucks. Right. A short-sleeve polo shirt. Since 2004, Wayne-o has run up $275,000 in
charges at the Zegna store in Beverly Hills, including a $21,000 charge in
February, 2017. All of these charges
were billed to (and paid by) the PR
firm, Ackerman-McQueen. No wonder the NRA and Ackerman-McQueen are now battling each other in court.
Maybe
there’s an innocent explanation for why Wayne-o has run up wardrobe costs which
outstrip anything Sarah Palin did in 2008. On the
other hand, if he used his Ackerman-McQueen account to hide purchases for
personal items which were then covered by invoices paid by NRA to the PR firm, someone’s going to jail. Using
tax-exempt dollars to pay for goods or services not directly related to the
tax-exempt entity’s approved affairs happens to be fraud. And $275,000 ain’t
chopped liver, even in my book.
Getting
back to our friend Shannon, there may be a more innocent reason why she’s
getting blasted again by the NRA. Go
to the MOMS website and type: https://momsdemandaction.org/take-action/.
Then go to the ‘Attend’ link, put in your zip code and see what comes up. Now go to the NRA website and type: https://explore.nra.org/interests/events-and-entertainment/. Then click around and look for ‘friends of NRA‘ events in the same code. I guarantee you’ll find more
grass-roots events sponsored by MOMS. I did it for Maryland – NRA has three upcoming events, MOMS has
nine.
Know why
the NRA hates Shannon and her gals?
Because MOMS is now a true, grass-roots
organization in every sense of the word.
Right on
Shannon, right on.
