NRA Earns Praise from Neo-Nazis, Condemnation from NAACP
12.11.2018
This week alone, the NRA has drawn attention for earning repeated praise from the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, as well as condemnation from the NAACP.
As Media Matters uncovered, the Daily Stormer has repeatedly praised the NRA’s extreme, and sometimes anti-semitic, rhetoric, and what the Daily Stormer has described as NRA leaders’ awareness “of the Jewish issue.” The Neo-Nazi website has even claimed, “The number 1 source of new recruits for the NRA has always been the Daily Stormer.”
It’s not the first time the NRA has had a run-in with white nationalists or neo-Nazis either. Last August, the NRA stood nearly alone in latching onto President Donald Trump’s insistence that there was equivalency between the neo-Nazis and those protesting against them in Charlottesville. NRATV host Chuck Holton wrote, “‘There’s blame on both sides.’ What part of what POTUS said is untrue?”
While it earns praise from neo-Nazis, the NRA is also being condemned this week by the NAACP for its silence following the death of Emantic J. Bradford, a black man and Army veteran who was shot and killed by police in an Alabama mall, while helping direct shoppers to safety following a report of shots being fired at the mall. The NAACP writes that the NRA “can no longer stay silent”:
“The senseless killing of Emantic J. Bradford and the silence from the NRA has confirmed that the 2nd amendment does not apply to legally licensed Black gun owners. Instead of standing by their principles, the NRA continues to demonize and alienate people of color who are gunned downed and blamed for exercising their right to own and brandish firearms. This narrative is just as old and tired as this organization and its time for them to stop this hypocrisy and finally come to terms with its racist rhetoric. The target on backs of Black and brown lives is getting larger and unlike the NRA, we will do all we can to stop this.”
It’s part of a long pattern of the NRA keeping silent when black Americans are shot and killed.