The new National Rifle Association head Oliver North a few days ago wasted no time wading into the contentious pool of controversy that always seems to surround the millions-strong organization. He believes the organization is being treated worse than civil rights organizations in the Jim Crow era, citing the splashing of fake blood on the Virginia home of a top NRA official and other personal “threats” aimed at NRA leaders and members as examples.

“They can do all the cyberwar against us — they’re doing it. They can use the media against us — they are. They’ve gone after our bank accounts, our finances, our donors, and obviously individual members,” North told the conservative website. “It’s got to stop. And that’s why the leadership invited me to become the next president of the NRA.”

North went further (to the horror of the pearl-clutching journaljizzer who reported on his comments) and called the clueless, ignorant, easily-manipulated Parkland kids “civil terrorists.”

In an era where anything and everything that someone doesn’t like gets slapped with the “terrorism” moniker, while politicians indiscriminately toss funds at any project in the name of “national security,” I do think the good colonel has stepped into the derp a bit.

That said… North is not wrong about gun owners and the NRA being treated like pariahs, persecuted at every step, and denigrated in nearly every medium. Just read the moronic commentary of the imbecile who wrote the article to which I linked above!

Ignoring the history of lynchings, legal segregation and discrimination that African-Americans endured for nearly a century following the end of slavery, North sought sympathy for his organization.

If anyone is ignoring history, it’s this Dennis Slattery douchebag, who engages in exactly the kind of behavior toward gun owners that North condemns, by implying that somehow America’s gun owners are responsible for lynchings, legal segregation, and discrimination against

African Americans, when history has shown that the right to keep and bear arms has actually helped protect African Americans and abolitionists against slave-owning, hateful bigots, and odious gun control laws were imposed to keep African slaves from defending themselves.

Later, in the 1960s, African Americans used firearms to defend themselves against racially motivated violence, and just a few years ago, the NRA supported the lawsuit of Otis McDonald – an African American man – against the city of Chicago, which challenged the city’s handgun ban, which prevented him from defending himself.

Those racists!

But facts don’t appear to matter to Slattery, who will take any opportunity to smear gun owners.

Additionally, lets take a look at the slurs that have been hurled in gun owners’ direction.

NRA has been called a “terrorist organization.” Repeatedly. By a whole lot of people.

The NRA is an association of millions law-abiding gun owners. I don’t remember a single NRA member committing a mass shooting, and yet, these everyday folks are being attacked repeatedly, accused of having blood on their hands, ostracized, and barred from entering numerous establishments while carrying their self defense tools on their person.

The Parkland kids have called for boycotts of businesses that associate themselves with the NRA – the biggest civil rights association in America – impacting the livelihoods and profits of those companies and their employees, and anyone else who disagrees with them.

Shannon Watts lies repeatedly about her arch nemesis Dana Loesch in an effort to paint Ms. Loesch as an aggressive, threatening gun nut.

They claim gun owners love their guns more than they love their children, which is absurd considering how many gun owners defend their children from armed thugs using said guns!

The American Bar Association has sought to disarm gun owners without due process.

Gun violence restraining orders force a gun owner to surrender their firearms to law enforcement, or authorize law enforcement to seize said firearms, absent a disqualifying criminal conviction.

So while Oliver North is going overboard with the hyperbole by calling clueless, easily manipulated Parkland activists “terrorists,” (they simply don’t fit the definition) he does have a point that NRA members and gun owners are being maligned, demeaned, and discriminated against.

Because it’s so classy to tell an association of millions of law-abiding citizens to go fuck themselves, right?

So, Oliver North is right. NRA members and American gun owners writ large are being treated like pariahs. The list of businesses that don’t respect gun owners’ rights is long and distinguished. Every time there’s a mass shooting, gun owners and the NRA are blamed for not giving up yet more of their rights to prop up politicians’ opportunism. We are called intransigent, callous, and uncaring, because we are sick and tired of being used as scapegoats every time some criminal vermin picks up a gun and goes on a shooting spree.

We are deprived of our tools of self defense in government buildings, restaurants, and shopping malls. We are cursed at and denigrated. We are treated as the problem, instead of the criminal scum that actually commits acts of violence.

And it’s time we stopped taking it.