The crossfire continues over the New Hampshire Firearms Coalition’s survey with the “fine print” declaration that failing to return that survey would brand you as anti-gun. Skip took them to the woodshed here, pointing out that it is both ridiculous and unproductive, and while Skip inferred it he never actually says it.
They are attempting to compel speech.
As a private non-government group they can silence dissent or attempt to compel whatever speech they’d like. And I’m not here to convince you otherwise. But there are consequences, and they are these:
We are taking time and energy to discuss how a so-called pro-gun group stomps on the first amendment for no obvious reason though I suspect it is to inflate their reputation. It appears to me that by threatening survey subjects with a scarlet letter they thought they could inflate the number of completed surveys. The inflated number of returns would produce a bigger score card. A bigger scorecard creates the perception of relevance. Maybe they grow their email list. Perhaps they work that list for donations. Maybe they start doing late-night infomercials hawking holsters made in third-world sweatshops.
That’s up to them. But what you do matters.
Skip described the intimidation language as equivalent to the left’s “you will be made to care or else” tactics which are both correct and confounding.
Why would a group that claims to stand on the shoulders of liberty in defense of the second amendment so casually step on the first amendment to do so?
What’s next? If you choose not to own a gun, you are anti-gun? There’s no liberty in either argument. People should be free to do or not do so by compelling completion of a survey “or else” you are no different or better than the hoplophobes whose priorities you claim to challenge.
I don’t know Alan Rice from a bag of donuts. I understand how a great many other folks, more than a few of whom are directly associated with Granitegrok.com feel about Alan Rice. They don’t much care for him. But I don’t know him.
I do know this. Demanding that someone complete and return a survey is not clever it is prescriptive. It looks bad. It’s arrogant. And it says things about your priorities, primarily that the group you claim to represent is more important than the issue it supposedly exists to defend.
Put another way, if your group matters more than liberty you are doing it right.
Thankfully, I’m a forgiving person. People make mistakes all the time. Some folks, who’ve spent years being douchebags can come around to the light and be productive contributors to the pursuit of individual rights and liberty. I wasn’t always a conservative, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone today who thinks I could ever have been anything else.
And that’s why I blog.
It is entirely the point of this exercise. We write to inform, entertain, educate, and expose people to ideas about politics and the culture in a way they are not getting from any other media resource. And with a bit of help from our friends, we hope to show people who weren’t with us before that government has no interest in them except as a slave or a serf to pay or advocate (willingly or otherwise) for priorities that may not be their own.
The Progressive experiment exists to compel not just speech but behavior, so when the NHFC survey does both, deliberately or not, I take issue with that.
But it’s not personal. This is strictly a physical relationship.
When you wander onto the liberal plantation, it’s okay to go, ‘Oh crap’ turn around, and come back.
That’s why we’re here. To remind each other when we go astray.
Just don’t make it your modus operandi to dip your toe into their poison pool and back out on a regular basis because that tells us you can’t be trusted to defend liberty unless it helps you personally or professionally in some way.
S, to prove this not about them, the NHFC should yank their survey, remove the offensive bits (as noted) and resubmit it with an apology. Admit you were wrong, and accept the input and guidance of others in the pro-gun and liberty movement who might otherwise have your back.
Or keep being a d*ck. That works for me. It makes the job of finding things to write about a whole lot easier.
It’s your choice.
