Industry Turncoat Resorts to Tired Smears to Push Citizen Disarmament

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)-

“I testified to Congress about the gun industry. It rattled me to my core,” Ryan Busse writes for the U.S. edition of the UK’s The Guardian. “Gun-makers are openly marketing to – and perhaps even creating – the next generation of mass shooters, all in service of their bottom line.”

Ryan Busse is a former industry executive “who is now a senior policy adviser for Giffords. He is the author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America.”

There’s a book that cries for a good fisking, as five minutes using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature makes clear.  But Busse’s latest sanctimonious recollections of biting the hand that fed him in front of a Democrat-led industry struggle session save us the trouble of further rewarding his betrayals.

He’s not even original in that. The industry had already seen two high-level desertions in years past.

“Gun lobbyist” Richard Feldman turned around after years of lucrative employment to pen Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist (in fairness, looking at revelations of Wayne LaPierre’s excesses that have since come out, NRA more than handed him all he needed to accuse its execs of using scare tactics to keep the money pouring in).

Then there was the late Robert Ricker. I won’t speak ill of the dead and I won’t try to hide what I said of him when he was alive.

I’m not forming any kinder impressions of this Busse character, especially seeing the way he resorts to smearing traditional Americans in general and gun owner rights advocates in particular as violent conspiracy nuts, extremists, and haters, all the while portraying himself as the epitome of a Fudd with a big “I believe in the Second Amendment but...”

“I’m still a proud gun owner who believes in responsibility,” Busse claims. What, and we who think he’s a manipulative apparatchik for the infringers don’t?

“Their industry is nakedly marketing to – and in the process perhaps even creating – the next generation of mass shooters, all in service of their bottom line,” Busse asserts.

That’s what “creates” killers? Occasional random exposure to magazine ads? Got data? And we’re now to limit commercial speech for everyone because society refuses to segregate a minuscule handful of dangerous aberrants from their potential victim pool while denying said victims from having the means of defense in government-mandated “gun-free zones”?

As an aside, for those who haven’t been paying attention, the industry is hardly the leader in the uncompromising fight to resist infringements. Some of us have long taken the gun companies to task for compromising (recall the Smith & Wesson Clinton sell-out at the White House Rose Garden or Bill Ruger throwing everyone else under the bus to save his Mini-14), or for not leading in a long overdue effort to “pull a Barrett” on cities and states that are trying to kill the “civilian” market.

As a former vice president of sales for Kimber, why hasn’t Ryan Busse turned over his corporate memos, business plans, and other documentation for creating that next generation over to the FBI for law enforcement action so they can frog march his former bosses to their cells? Perhaps because he doesn’t actually have anything to substantiate the libel, but he knows he can get away with it to the applause of approving media amplifiers?

What does Busse mean by “responsibility”? It’s pretty obvious. Everything his new trough-fillers at Giffords want. All backed up with government guns in case anyone is inclined not to “cooperate.” And the dig at “Kyle Rittenhouse killing people at a protest with his Smith & Wesson Military & Police-line rifle” — that is, at an innocent man adjudicated with full due process to have lawfully defended himself — stands in pretty stark contrast to all those prior restraints and prohibitions without due process that Busse’s new masters are so hot on imposing.

And no character smear would be complete without channeling his inner Antifa blackshirt and implying that his ideological opponents are Nazis. Hence we get his much ado about nothing over “a Norse tattoo known to be favored by white supremacists and by the ‘QAnon’ shaman.”

Oh, them. Like nobody I know.

But since he brought it up the valknut is also used by SCA, Sweden’s renewable and sustainable forestry product company, and by the German Football Association. In this case, though, Busse is attempting to conflate the industry with Odinists, which is a curious bit of narrative conflict when you consider the rest of the left is going nuts over “Christian Nationalists.”

And about that “racism” guilt by association Busse’s trying to establish, it’s not his side that documented and condemned “the racist roots of gun control” or reminds people of the commendable actions of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Isn’t it curious that he condemns Republicans for inviting “a witness from Gun Owners of America” but somehow doesn’t think it relevant to mention who that witness was?

It’s not Busse’s side celebrating record gun  sales “, especially among African Americans and first-time gun buyers.” His side is the one demanding special disarmament restrictions on minorities and resurrecting Jim Crow laws by pricing the tools of defense outside of what the less financially able can afford: It’s all Democrats proposing that 1,000 % tax on semiautos.

What idiot prohibitionists can never seem to get in their heads about racism is that judging someone’s worth based on the group they were born into, instead of by their words and actions as individuals, is flat-out collectivism. The only people who do that are collectivists. And we see Busse trying to do that here. For a guy who is trying so hard to present himself as “woker than thou” and holding the moral high ground, that’s pretty contemptible. But at least the paycheck’s steady.

And that leads us to a warning issued back in 2005 by the late Neal Knox, commenting on an NRA “help wanted” ad for a state liaison, stating, “Experience with firearms, hunting, and criminal justice reform issues helpful, but not required.”

“…Ricker’s highly publicized stance serves to point out the pitfalls of NRA’s policy of seeking to employ Washington insiders, rather than individuals concerned with Second Amendment issues,” Knox correctly observed.

I was not as polite:

“If you’re going to dally with whores, don’t act all shocked and indignant when you find them doing somebody else.”

There’s a line from Goldfinger you’d think the industry would have learned by now, especially with Busse making this the third time.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.