Shots fired: San Francisco declares NRA ‘domestic terrorists’

The San Francisco, California supervisors declaring the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorist organization” seems like virtue-signaling, but it may well be a major escalation in the culture war already shaking the US.

The NRA uses its wealth and strength to “incite gun owners to acts of violence,” declared the resolution adopted Tuesday by the all-Democrat panel, urging the city not to do business with anyone associated with the organization.

It also accused the NRA of spreading “propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence,” and promoting “extremist positions, in defiance of the views of a majority of its membership and the public.”

Democrats used to accuse President Donald Trump of lying when he said they were out to take away Americans’ guns. Now they are falling over themselves to prove him right.

There are many things to unpack here. First of all, the resolution does not have the force of law. Cities or even states don’t get to define terrorism, domestic or otherwise – that’s the federal government’s job. According to the FBI, domestic terrorists are primarily US-based movements “that espouse extremist ideologies of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”

So what would opposing the US Constitution – its Second Amendment, to be precise – amount to, then?

Then there is the hypocrisy. Supervisor Catherine Stefani tells the media the resolution was inspired by mass shootings in recent months. Not a single perpetrator of those has been a member of the NRA – unlike the Texas man who stopped a mass shooter at a church in 2017, for example. 

©  Reuters / Adrees Latif

“They should reasonably know by now that they are fueling the hate fire in this country,” Stefani told the Washington Post. “People are dying, and they continue to stand in the way of reform.”

However, no amount of gun laws means a thing if the authorities are unwilling to prosecute people due to political considerations. The man who shot and killed San Francisco woman Kate Steinle in 2015 first dodged murder and manslaughter convictions, and last week got his gun possession conviction overturned on a technicality. Critics are saying the only reason for this treatment is that the killer is an illegal immigrant, and Democrats are determined to make San Francisco and California a sanctuary for those. 

Last, but not least, we get to the twisting of the meaning of words. Stefani told KQED radio that NRA bumper stickers about not giving up guns are “saying reasoned debate about public safety should be met with violence.” 

Refusing to give up one’s constitutional right is somehow an incitement to violence and hate, but Congressman Eric Swalwell talking about using atomic weapons on civilians is fine? Ah, Swalwell has a (D) next to his name, however – so that makes all the difference.

San Francisco has a bit of a history of trying to change the meaning of words in order to force social and political change into existence. Just last month, the very same board of supervisors mandated calling a former felon a “justice-involved person” or “returning resident,” while a juvenile offender became a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system,” to name but two examples. 

This may sound like silly virtue-signaling, even as San Francisco is drowning in human waste, used needles and other detritus of the city’s skyrocketing population of addicts and the homeless – another (side?) effect of bleeding-heart refusal to enforce laws about public safety. 

“This is just another worthless and disgusting ‘sound bite remedy’ to the violence epidemic gripping our nation,” NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter said, dismissing the resolution even as she called it a “reckless assault on a law-abiding organization.”

Manipulating the language is never a laughing matter, though, and shows that this is not about guns, and never was. It’s about power. Between their two recent resolutions, the San Francisco supervisors have decided to boldly cross through the looking-glass, so to speak: 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

By Nebojsa Malic, senior writer at RT 

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