New York Post Anti-Gun Clickbait Aims To Rile Readers — It Worked
6th Dec 2019
Source Credit to gunsamerica.com by LEVI SIM on NOVEMBER 28, 2019
How do you think Alexander Hamilton would feel if he could see, today, the newspaper he founded 200 years ago? I doubt he’d be proud of the sensationalist tabloid content they make. Since 1976, they’ve been using ridiculous headlines to draw readers’ eyes — they invented clickbait before you could click. This time, the content is as ridiculous as the headline.
John Crudele posted an editorial in the business section on Monday reacting to an email he got from Henry Repeating Arms advertising their AR-7 rifle for the holidays, “Nothing says ‘Merry Christmas’ Like An AR-7.”
You and I know that the AR-7 is Henry’s .22 LR survival rifle. It breaks down and all the components fit inside the water-tight stock. Like the AR-15, it was designed by Eugene Stoner at ArmaLite and its predecessors were used by the Air Force as survival rifles for plane crews.
The AR-7 is a semi-auto .22 rifle and it’s generally marketed as a highly portable survival gun. The kind of thing you’d bring on a camping trip or a rafting trip.
Crudele was raging about it because the AR-7 could be used to “kill a lot of people” and doesn’t belong under the tree for Christmas. He says its compact form and lightweight would make it easy to sneak into schools or movie theaters to “kill a lot of people.”
He never shows a picture of the AR-7. He just shows a wall full of large semi-auto rifles at a gun store — AKs, ARs, and various other “black” guns adorn the wall.
Of course, he had to use that picture because if anyone saw the actual AR-7 they would see how ridiculous his premise is. It’s basically a big boy’s Red Rider BB gun. But it could “kill a lot of people.”
The post on Twitter has more than 1,600 comments, and none that I read on the first several pages were in support of the author’s opinion.
He wrote, “There was also the boilerplate comment about how the company hoped ‘your loved ones never actually find themselves in a life and death situation’ and would only need the gun for target shooting with friends.”
With this line, he’s implying that the life and death situation Henry was alluding to is some kind of active shooter situation. Of course, Henry means the gun can be handy in a bush plane in case you get stuck in the backcountry longer than expected. Not that it could help you survive the zombie apocalypse.
According to Crudele, it’s companies like Henry who are creating fuel for the gun industry to burn itself. “Companies like this give people who don’t like guns a reason to continue their dislike for them.” On the contrary: it’s misleading articles like his that plant the idea that people should dislike guns.
This guy received a marketing email from Henry Repeating Arms. That means he signed up for their mailing list. The right answer to this email would have been to hit the “unsubscribe” button.
Unfortunately, I doubt the New York Post will lose very many of its four-hundred thousand subscribers over Crudele’s article. Fortunately, that’s fewer than half the number of subscribers to GunsAmerica. He and his followers are just part of a noisy minority.
What are you hoping for under the tree this Christmas?
