Moms Demand Action Push Anti-Gun Agenda Through Food Banks :: 05/27/2020

Right now, a lot of people are hungry. People have lost jobs and the grocery stores are still not stocked like they were before the pandemic. It’s not a fun situation to be in for any of us.

Yet for millions of Americans, it’s worse. They’re actually one of those poor, suffering souls.

However, as bad as that is, it’s an opportunity for anti-gun jihadists. At least, that’s how Moms Demand Action in Arkansas looked at it. That’s why they started pushing their anti-gun agenda through local food banks.

n the first week of April, a 14-year-old girl in Jonesboro, Arkansas, found her father’s rifle during a game of hide-and-seek. The gun went off, killing her friend.

It was exactly the kind of tragic accident Rebekah Evans had worried about since the coronavirus crisis forced schools to close in her community. Arkansas has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the United States, and the pandemic has driven millions of Americans to purchase weapons, often for the first time. With kids cooped up at home, and looking for ways to entertain themselves, the conditions for tragedy were ripe.

Evans, who is the volunteer group leader in Jonesboro’s chapter of Moms Demand Action, a gun violence prevention advocacy group, was spurred to act. She convened a Zoom meeting with a handful of other local activists to brainstorm about ways to distribute information about the importance of safely storing guns — especially if a child is around. Recalling reports of a high demand for food in the area, they called local food pantries and asked to distribute pamphlets from the Mom’s Demand Be Smart program, which promotes safe gun storage, alongside food and other emergency supplies.

“It’s hard to know how to be helpful in our communities right now, so it was gratifying to do something concrete and something I hope will keep children safe in their homes,” Evans said. (Moms Demand Action is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, which provides grants to The Trace through its nonpolitical arm.)

Evans said food pantries have handed out more than 200 pamphlets and are asking for more.

Now, one might figure that pamphlets pushing gun safety are a good thing, right? Well, they would be…if Moms Demand Action actually knew anything about firearms, how to use one defensively, or much of anything else other than how to be deathly afraid of them.

You see, their “Be Smart” program advocates for people keeping guns in a state where they cannot be used for home defense at all. They tell people to start weapons and ammunition not just locked but to store them separately. In other words, don’t just lock your gun up, lock it up in a state where it’s completely useless as another other than a paperweight or a poorly-designed club.

And really, Moms Demand Action wouldn’t see a problem with that. After all, they don’t understand firearms as anything other than “instruments of death” or whatever. They don’t understand the demands of personal defense. To them, guns are just things you have for specific recreational occasions, and that’s at best.

So, in their minds, they don’t see a problem with expecting people to hear to sound of glass breaking in the middle of the night then get up and fumble with a lock as the adrenaline courses through their veins, then finally get a safe open only to have to fumble with ammunition or a magazine to load the weapon, then–in the case of a semi-automatic–to remember to rack the slide, all while hoping these intruders are the slowed Mofos on the freaking planet.

This is what they’re trying to cram down people’s throats.

Time and time again, I’ve argued that if these groups actually cared about real gun safety, they’d try to work with the NRA on that topic, not vilify them. At least they could learn what so many gun owners need out of a safety program.

But, then they’d have to recognize us as real people.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/05/27/push-anti-gun-agenda-food-banks/