Gun Nuts Find a New Target: The NFL

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As 2013 comes to a close, gun advocates can count up their impressive string of victories this year. They defeated the strongest push for new federal gun laws in a generation, handing President Obama an embarrassing defeat and defying the will of 90 percent of the American public. They saw Illinois, the last state to ban people from carrying guns in public, finally loosen its laws. They successfully mounted a recall effort to remove two Colorado lawmakers from office for supporting new gun restrictions. Yet gun advocates may have finally found an opponent they can’t beat: the National Football League.

This week, Guns & Ammo magazine broke the story that the NFL rejected a proposed Super Bowl advertisement for Daniel Defense, a gun manufacturer based in Georgia. The ad, which features a handsome young father explaining that he’s “chosen the most effective tool” for defending his family from harm, was dinged by the NFL for violating the league’s policy on advertisements. That policy prohibits any ads that feature “firearms, ammunition or other weapons.” Although Daniel Defense’s ad doesn’t show any actual firearms—though it does feature the company’s logo, which is an artistic rendering of a military-style rifle—the league barred Fox, the network that will air the Super Bowl, from running it.

To gun advocates, this was nothing less than a declaration of war. Alex Jones, who last made headlines with a notorious anti-gun control rant on Piers Morgan’s show, said the NFL’s decision proved the league was “anti-family,” “anti-liberty,” and “anti-American.” Worse yet, Jones said, the NFL was in cahoots with the imperialistic Obama Administration, which is using the Super Bowl as a venue for political propaganda, just like Hitler did with the 1936 Munich Olympics.

This isn’t the first time the NFL and its broadcast partners ran afoul of gun advocates. Last year, they were furious when sports commentator Bob Costas, during halftime of a Sunday Night Football game, blamed the “gun culture” after Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot and killed his girlfriend before taking his own life. Challenging the very essence of gun rights ideology, Costas had the audacity to say that “handguns don’t save lives.”

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115834/nfl-bans-gun-ad-two-americas-favorite-things-go-war