Mark Follman of Mother Jones has written a post about advocates of loose gun laws who harass female gun control advocates. They stalk. They make death threats. They threaten rape.
Here's what Follman tells us about one victim of these men:
AS JENNIFER LONGDON STEERED her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she'd participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.The fact that Longdon soldiers on after abuse like this puts me in awe of her bravery.
As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face....
Longdon is no stranger to such attacks. Last May in her hometown of Phoenix, she helped coordinate a gun buyback program with local police over three weekends. On the first Saturday, a group of men assembled across the street from the church parking lot where Longdon was set up....
Some of them approached Longdon. "You know what was wrong with your shooting?" one said. "They didn't aim better." Another man came up, looked Longdon up and down and said, "I know who you are." Then he recited her home address....
After a fundraiser one night during the program, Longdon returned home around 10 p.m., parked her ramp-equipped van and began unloading herself. As she wheeled up to her house, a man stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in black and had a rifle, "like something out of a commando movie," Longdon told me. He took aim at her and pulled the trigger. Longdon was hit with a stream of water. "Don't you wish you had a gun now, bitch?" he scoffed before taking off.
"It was like a mock execution," Longdon says....
But I have a disagreement with her.
The majority of gun owners in America are good people, she adds. "I wish that more responsible gun owners would step into this conversation and say 'Look, those guys don't speak for us.'"No, she's wrong. The majority of gun owners in America are not good people, and she just told us why. They don't speak out about this. They don't distance themselves from people like this.
Now, I understand that a lot of ordinary gun owners don't know that this kind of intimidation is taking place. But there's been plenty of publicity lately for acts of garden-variety intimidation -- the guy who defiantly waved a gun near a Little League field, or people having a brandish-in at a Starbucks in Newtown, Connecticut. When are supposedly decent, well-meaning gun owners going to put some distance between themselves and people who do things like that?
Follman's article quotes a couple of gun advocates who seem to have a problem with all this, but the problem they have is that they don't think it's good for them strategically:
Some staunch advocates of expansive gun rights recognize that this kind of bullying is bad for the movement. In March, a talk radio host and self-described gun enthusiast in Wisconsin called the "in your face open-carry playbook" tactics "perfectly legal, and perfectly stupid." After the Arlington restaurant incident, the editor of BearingArms.com wrote that Open Carry Texas had achieved "a public relations disaster."The latter is a reference to an incident in which forty members of Open Carry Texas "armed with assault rifles showed up outside an Arlington, Texas, restaurant where four women from Moms Demand Action were having lunch." That's not a "public relations disaster" -- that's thuggery. If members of the gun community won't say so -- if they continue to look the other way -- then, no, they're not good people.
