Man, I thought the lack of taste and web savvy at the NRA was bad, but it pales in comparison to an item that the National Shooting Sports Foundation—another big player on the pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-hands lobby—has up on its website 12+ hours after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history:
College Shotgun Event Hits the Mainstream
Shooters from 32 colleges and universities competed at the 39th annual ACUI Intercollegiate Clay Target Championships. As youth development programs, like NSSF’s Schlastic Clay Target Program gain popularity, more students are continuing to shoot competively in college.
Hello #1: Are the crisis communications folks at these places totally asleep at the wheel?
Hello #2: Can’t the NSSF afford a spellchecker?
The NSSF has taken a particular umbrage at lawsuits accusing gun manufacturers of liability when they ignore obvious evidence that straw and kitchen table dealers are buying up guns only to sell them on the black market, as Greg Sargent reported in a 2005 Mother Jones piece called “The Ricochet“:
Industry spokespeople insist that manufacturers aren’t trained in law enforcement and are “no more responsible for criminal misuse of their product than Budweiser is responsible for drunk driving,” in the words of Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a well-funded industry group.
Well-funded, indeed. As we reported in 1995:
A partnership between the government and the gun industry is marketing guns to kids in school. By 1999 more than 26 million students will have been exposed to a marketing program designed by the industry’s leading trade association–the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). The program, paid for in large part with federal tax dollars, aims to increase firearm sales and reduce support for gun control.
