Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Is this what you signed up for?

Wisconsin has a proud hunting tradition that is embedded in the DNA of our state. So it shouldn't be a surprise that we also have hunters and others that have memberships in various groups that are supposed to focus on their issues. However, I have to wonder if the majority of Wisconsin hunters ever meant to sign up for some of the extremist rhetoric that has been coming out of the National Rifle Association in particular.

The wild and paranoid rantings of many NRA board members has been on the record for some time but thanks to the new website "Meet the NRA" we have much of it posted in one place. Whether it is vigilantism, politically violent rhetoric or other extremist statements, I simply don't accept that the average Wisconsin hunter signed up for any of it.

Now the NRA board seems to be going further in the direction of paranoid conspiracy theories. Recently the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre got all conspiratorial about President Obama. Check out the video below where he actually cites the President not pushing gun control as the very reason that he's anti-gun. Confused? Yeah, you should be, because it is baseless and it makes no sense. But LaPierre ignores reality and boils it all down to some imagined "conspiracy". Is that really the kind of thing that Wisconsin hunters signed up for?



This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters' mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.

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