The National Rifle Association (NRA) hasn’t garnered a reputation as one of the most powerful political groups in the United States for being a shrinking violet. The NRA has often resorted to questionable messaging and communication tactics to defend and advocate American citizens’ rights to bear arms, but the organisation’s recent proposal to install armed guards in schools as a way to combat the country’s shocking incidence of gun violence in schools – proposed after the Sandy Hook tragedy – is ludicrously counterproductive to resolving the greater problem.
Today President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden announced the proposal to introduce bans of assault rifles and high capacity clips among a list of other active measures to counter gun violence in America. Almost simultaneously the NRA released a new ad for its “Stand And Fight” campaign, this time targeting the President directly with the hook, “Are the President’s kids more important than yours?”
Offensive only begins to describe the content of this ad, which chooses the President’s daughters as its target, while pointing fingers at the White House for the “elitist hypocrites” within. This line of argument promoting the increased presence of guns in schools is embarrassingly off point and utterly batshit. On the plus side, it is this kind of increasingly parody-like propaganda that makes the NRA look like credibility-hemorrhaging jack offs.
