{"id":7053,"date":"2011-08-07T16:46:23","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T23:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=7053"},"modified":"2011-08-07T16:46:23","modified_gmt":"2011-08-07T23:46:23","slug":"an-evening-with-the-gun-nuts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=7053","title":{"rendered":"An Evening with the Gun Nuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a previous post<\/a> I mentioned our upcoming Saturday night date: dinner at a National Rifle Association auction.\u00a0 I wanted to wear my ACLU member pin but couldn’t find it.\u00a0 I did my homework, though, and was prepared to argue the case for protecting all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, not just the one.\u00a0 Alas, the situation never came up.<\/p>\n

Donna works part time at a local gun store.\u00a0 Her boss usually reserves a table or two at these events, and employees can bring their spouses.\u00a0 The way the auction works, you submit silent (paper) bids on guns, holsters, and shooting accessories donated by local NRA members and supporting businesses.\u00a0 After dinner, organizers announce who won what, and proceeds go to the local NRA chapter.<\/p>\n

The NRA auction in July 2007, the only other one I’ve attended, was politically charged.\u00a0 I blogged about the experience<\/a>; I still remember being acutely aware of my outsider status.\u00a0 I expected more of the same last night, but there were only two brief instances where I felt like a Martian observing events through a immense telescope on Phobos.\u00a0 The first was when the minister giving the invocation sneered at an anonymous (and obviously fictional) event organizer who asked him to make his opening prayer non-denominational.\u00a0 The second occurred later in the program, when an embarrassed emcee briefly turned the microphone over to a man who told us about JPOF … Jews for the Protection of Firearms … and how they had discovered that some piece of gun control legislation passed during the Kennedy administration in 1961 turned out to be a “word-for-word translation of Hitler’s gun confiscation law.”<\/p>\n

Oh, and then there were the flag shirts.\u00a0 Tucson NRA Chapter members who organized and officiated at last night’s event … about a dozen of them, men and women … wore the shirt on the left (I grabbed the image from the NRA website; and I must say the shirts don’t look nearly as nice in XXXL, draped over potbellies).<\/p>\n