Monday, August 14, 2017

NRA ≠ Nazi


I was reading Prof. William Jacobson's Legal Insurrection this morning. He had a post about the clash in Charlottesville this past weekend. He had a link to this tweet by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos.



I hate to disappoint Mr. Moulitsas but he is wrong in so many ways.

First, it has to be pointed out that conservatives and Nazis are not one and the same. In fact their beliefs are antithetical to one another. A conservative generally believes in smaller government while Nazis (from their origin in German) believe in a strong national government that pervades all aspects of life.

Second, while the NRA is generally a conservative organization, they are accepting of people from all walks of life. They have liberals and conservatives as members. They have gays and straights as members. They have Democrats and Republicans as members. Indeed, when the president of the NRA Pete Brownell has a scheduled phone conversation with Erin Palette of Operation Blazing Sword and asks how they can work together, I think that says it all in terms of acceptance.

I will grant you that there might be a member of the NRA who holds Nazi and/or fascist beliefs. But I would say that any mass organization of 5 million members with open membership is liable to have a few outliers within its membership rolls.


5 comments:

  1. Sadly, we reached the point where progressive argument is at the Brawndo in 'Idiocracy' level of logic. The NRA is the toilet water and disarmament is what people crave. Because something.

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  2. Your mistake is to argue with Moulitsas on the assumption he's a rational person interested in rational argument. That is not so. The statement he makes clearly is a bigoted attempt to tar a large fraction of the population with a very tarry brush, with no care whatsoever of facts or honesty.

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  3. The National Socialist Workers Party in Germany was anti gun. NAZI's are authoritarian leftists who wanted the people disarmed. The politicians with that agenda here are their political counterparts, "socialists" as in the acronym or communists. -Ron W

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  4. The NRA not only ≠ Nazi, the NRA is pretty much the exact opposite of Nazi, for a lot of reasons. This guy Moulitsas is Godwin's law incarnate: he's incapable of 20 seconds of thought without invoking Hitler.


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