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Attacking gun rights

Betsy Riot, a new group of gun-hating vandals has popped up just in time for the elections.  Their mission:  trying to bully gun owners into the closet and to surrender our God-given rights.  Their claim to fame so far lies a series of criminal acts of vandalism gleefully logged on their Facebook page.

Their most notable act?  Vandalism at an NRA election office.  RawStory.com is on it:

A “neo-suffragette” group called The Betsy Riot is promoting pranks, and apparently vandalism, against the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups.

The group, whose lobby is “F*ck Yer Guns,” is being blamed for anti-gun graffiti spray-painted outside the NRA’s rented office in Roanoke, Virginia — where a disgruntled former employee gunned down two former WDBJ-TV colleagues a year ago this week.

A local lawyer, Mel Williams, rented a spare office in his building to the NRA two weeks ago as an election field office, and the gun manufacturer lobbying group held an open house Saturday, when the vandals struck, reported The Roanoke Times.

Two women painted “murder lobby” in foot-tall letters on a retaining wall outside the group’s office, and The Betsy Riot posted a photo of the vandalism along with an approving message.

Police are investigating the incident, which was apparently recorded on video, and charges are possible.

Betsy Riot signed up for their web domain in late July 2016.  Like most bullies, they are really cowards who love to conceal their true identities, anonymously registering their domain.  They hide their identities behind masks to rob us of our rights, just like the Ku Klux Klan did decades ago to bully African-Americans into ceding their rights.

ku_klux_klan_members_and_a_burning_cross_denver_colorado_1921

While the Betsy Rioters probably don’t wear sheets fashioned into hoods with eyeholes, their cause is no less insidious or repugnant.  They flirt with fascism in their often vulgar efforts to suppress gun owners’ First Amendment free speech rights – in addition to our Second Amendment rights.

Yes Fascism, as defined by Webster’s:

often capitalized :  a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

… “and forcible suppression of opposition.”

If their cause was noble, they wouldn’t need to hide their identities while trying to take our liberties!

My day job is the Executive Director at Guns Save Life, a regional gun rights group based in Central Illinois.  Locally, we’re known for our six monthly upbeat grassroots gun rights meetings across Illinois.  We publish GunNews Magazine, our monthly journal with a circulation averaging about 20,000 per month.  People travelling through Illinois know us best for our thought-provoking highway sign program that uses about two dozen Burma Shave-style sign sets along highways and Interstates in Illinois.  These pro-gun messages are seen by about 600,000 people a day, as calculated using Department of Transportation traffic census maps.  We share slogans like this:

DIALED 9-1-1
AND I’M ON HOLD
SURE WISH I HAD
THAT GUN I SOLD
GunsSaveLife.com

About a dozen years ago we had a rash of vandalism attacks, akin to what Betsy Rioters have done in the top photo.  We kept repairing the vandalism and the vandals kept returning – for weeks.

thugsspraylies1

Finally, after about three attacks in one week, we came up with a new idea.  We erected a second tier of sign panels.  Leaving the vandalized panels up, the second set of panels read:

AS YOU CAN SEE
THUGS SPRAY LIES
HARD AS THEY TRY
FREEDOM WON’T DIE
GunsSaveLife.com

thugspraylies

We didn’t have another spray paint vandalism attack for many years.

One thinks freedom-loving people could similarly shame these hoplophobes at Betsy Riot.

Here are some of the often vulgar criminal acts publicized at the Betsy Riot Facebook page:

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54 COMMENTS

  1. The Murder Lobby Favors Gun Control. That was the whole message, right?

    These are the people that key your car. Swat people. Cock roaches have more benefit to society.

    • Now there is an interesting thought: did a foreign State sponsor agitators who designed, produced, and distributed these stickers?

    • Ironic that they are referred to as a “neo-suffragette” group. Suffragette referred to the push to give women the right to vote, yet now they want to steal the right of women (and everyone else) to self-defense.

  2. Hmm. Someone invested a non-trivial amount of time and money on graphic design as well as manufacturing of those stickers. I am curious how widespread those stickers are appearing. A sense of the geographical distribution would help infer just how much money is involved here.

  3. The stickers may be professionally printed. There’s companies that do that sort of thing. It’s not a huge stretch for law enforcement to make a few polite inquiries to some of the larger firms and see who is paying for it.

    “Design Order 123456789 – paid with card ending in 9877 – shipped to Dianne Watts-Bloomberg in 90023”

    It may require a warrant, though. Not sure if a judge would waste his or her time on vandals, especially if the judge agrees with their message.

    • Judges rarely care that much, warrants are typically just a normal course of business. It is getting the police to investigate that you have to convince.

  4. Here’s what stuck out at me from the article excerpt:
    “gun manufacturer lobbying group”
    referring to the NRA.

    Unbiased media, blah blah blah.

  5. “Murder Lobby” Dam! when do we get one near me! I’ll be there opening day!

    They were gonna name themselves “Pussy Riot” but that name was already taken.

  6. If these ass hats are posting their cowardly deeds on face book, isn’the that evidence that could be used to arrest them?

    • Well that would assume there was law and order in this country. Didn’t hitlary teach us anything about facism and how the law only applies to certain people? If you believe in your rights you are their enemy. If you believe in the right to protect yourself from facism you are their enemy. If you believe that free people should have an accountable government YOU are their enemy. The media is “they”, career politicians are “they”, and “they” are the fascists.

  7. The NSA knows how many times you farted today, but cannot protect us from Hillocrap’s intentional info-sieve, or Betsy freaks.

    Thanks nameless faceless tax $ suck.

      • …. and that’s how they know; also, how many times you rub one out per day, average strokes-per-minute, what pr0n is utilised, etc. Linked with a “smart”phone, they are really just voluntary NSA tracking devices.

        • And expensive too.

          Why don’t you just have them stake a tag thru your dorsal fin. It won’t be so interruptive your battle stress exercises.

  8. Bullies? “Extremists”? Please, call these people what they are; punks. The kind of people who think that putting a sticker on a gun magazine is “fighting the power”, are punks. These a graffiti rats, the kind of people who would probably curl up in a ball, piss their pants, and cry for their mommies if any one ever caught them. Just ignore them, or better yet, get on their facebook page and troll them.

  9. Brown Shirts of the modern era. I wonder who funded the stickers though. That would be an interesting story by its self I suspect.

    • If kapo bloomberg and soros were to meet a tragic and untimely end folks like these bugs and shannon watts would have to get real jobs.

      Not saying I’m wishing anything bad to befall them. But I wouldn’t mourn their passing.

    • Real Brown Shirts took to the streets to crack skulls. I don’t approve of it, but it’s at least open and honest. These vandalous brats are just posers.

      Brown Shirts wannabes are Brown Shorts gonnabes as soon as one these armed gunowners catches them in the act.

      • Well, I’m not gonna shoot somebody for vandalism, but however they arrived might not be in the same condition when they leave! Smartass hit and run tactics hit a snag when you return to all your tires are flat, or there are bullet holes in Daddy’s windshield. How are you going to complain while yourself engaging in deliberate vandalism?

  10. Years ago, Democrats kept stealing pro-Republican campaign signs at night from my property. So I called the candidate and told him to send over the biggest truck he could find with the biggest sign he had and park it in my driveway — across the street from my local polling place.

    The sign he sent over had to be ten feet long and five feet high.

    I waited at night for the little scvmbag Dem punks to show up.

    Which they didn’t. Sadly.

  11. If they really believed potg are part of some mythical “murder lobby”, they would lock themselves in their safe spaces and avoid our homes and places of businesses like the plague.

  12. “The group, whose lobby is “F*ck Yer Guns,” is being blamed for anti-gun graffiti spray-painted outside the NRA’s rented office in Roanoke, Virginia — where a disgruntled former employee gunned down two former WDBJ-TV colleagues a year ago this week.”

    A disgruntled former NRA employee!? Oh, nevermind. It’s just a poorly written* sentence that, on a quick read through, makes it sound like NRA employees go around shooting each other.

    *or well written, depending on who signs the checks.

  13. I live in Roanoke and work a few blocks from where this happened and this is the first I’ve heard of it. The local news seems to be loathe to cover it, save for this one column I uncovered in my Googling: http://www.roanoke.com/news/columns_and_blogs/columns/dan_casey/casey-roanoke-vandalism-gets-high-marks-from-new-anti-gun/article_d63bf193-d5e6-5adf-9429-93e796d46142.html

    I almost didn’t read it, because Dan Casey is so hatey even my ultra-liberal friends don’t like him. He claims petty crime doesn’t make headlines, but when the same thing happened at Planned Parenthood — you guessed it. Don’t read the column. The amount of barely suppressed glee is nauseating.

  14. The law should throw the book at betsy rioters and label them a domestic terrorist organization.

    I certainly won’t let those anti-gun idiots shut me up. Also, as much as I love my guns, I won’t f**k them. An accidental bump on the slide release might prove detrimental to my reproductive capabilities.

  15. A person either supports and respects individual rights, or he/she doesn’t. Those who don’t have likely been brainwashed with the collective agitprop that is slung at the public 24/7.

  16. It’s fascinting how easily manipulated people are, and how far these kids will take convictions that they have embraced without so much as a shred of objective thought.

  17. I have dealt with the Betsy Riot types, they are nothing more than cowardly bullies. They have tried to harass me on social media and when I made specific threats against them, they retreated. One of them freaked out when I said I would sick my Belgian Malinois on her. I would let him keep biting until she was a bloody mess. Just some good pushback and they will crawl back into their safe spaces

  18. Several folks have commented on the difficulty and expense of making up stickers and signs. I’ve had small to medium quantities of custom printing work done and my best guess is that we’re talking only in the hundreds rather than thousands of dollars. Spread a three or four hundred dollar printing bill around a half dozen people and the cost per person is about $50 to $75. That’s lunch money to a trust fund liberal or a communications major who is going to school on daddy’s dime.

    The tactics are old – just be irritating enough to bother people.Try not to commit any major crimes but annoy people all day long, every day. As most of us who have raised children have learned early on, the only solutions to irritation and annoyance is to give in, ignore it , or apply some fairly strict disciplinary measures. While Browning (as in Ma Deuce) irritating little gnats like the BetsyRioters might be pretty satisfying, I doubt that such an action would be acceptable outside the reddest of red states. So what else will work besides heavy weapons? I won’t pick “give in” as a solution, so ignore them sounds like the best option. Sure it’s vandalism, but ignoring the vandals often deprives them of the attention that they crave.

    • I haven’t seen any of the Betsy Riot crap, but I did see a slickly produced “Hillary for Prison 2016” yard sign last week. I was impressed. Maybe you just glue a printed sign over another yard sign, or something, but it sure looked like the real deal, a heavy plastic sign with legs stuck in the dirt.

  19. Up in my neck of the woods the socialist scum is busy stealing or vandalizing trump signs. One guy had enough and wired the sign to his electric fence, with a warning sign to make it legal. The sign being very small but still legal in size.

  20. Somewhere in here I posted that the DOJ was working for/with Betsy and vice versa, and it got deleted. Pourqoui?

    If the DOJ wants to sue for defamation, tell them to get their stupid asses to the nearest courthouse and file, and I’ll waste the rest of their 2016 with discovery, because they’re wasting too much of their time right now abusing their authority in attempting to use their powers against me. If not, tell them they better start supporting the Constitution more, and sticking a fork in the a-holes that are against my rights. If it’s legal to say that humans have the slightest impact on the climate of the earth (more than, say, an Indonesian volcano that spews thousands of tons of molten Sulfur a day) then it should be legal to say that ARMS in the U.S. are protected by the Constitution, and those who say otherwise are ANTI-CONSTITUTIONAL and need to be fought hard, DAMN HARD (and, that they can and should also do excessive strangubation).

    Get the important sh-t right. Fix the Betsy crap, and (since the Prez has woken me up to the fact that I’m lazy)
    TELL THE MF PREZ TO STOP PROTESTING THE U.S. ON FOREIGN SOIL. That’s treason.

    If the DOJ can’t track down a few kids with PRINTED STICKERS and paint cans, then they have NO HOPE [and change, yeah I went there] of protecting the rest of us and they need to pack their sh_t and go back to the house.

    P.S. – Betsy sounds like another big (D) subversive group, like BLM, KKK, anyone who’s read Alinsky or had to lie to herself about Lewinsky.

  21. Just a side note… Shameless criminals as they are, private individuals do not need to respect anyone’s freedom of speech.

  22. While I don’t agree with Betsy Riot’s actions or opinions at all, I do disagree with the idea that anybody hiding their identity while espousing any particular political opinions is a coward. Both sides of pretty much any hot-button debate are rife with people who want to do harm to those who disagree with them. Threats of murder and sexual violence are ubiquitous within discussions of hot-button issues, particularly toward women, so it’s no surprise to me that these people are hiding their identities. People on both sides of the gun debate come up against threats of violence, just as people on both sides of [for example] that whole GamerGate thing had more than their fair share of death threats. It’s not cowardice, it’s the fact that there are people out there petty enough to ruin someone’s life because they disagree with them politically.

    That kind of volatility helps neither side, honestly. But as long as people think “I’ll kill you for believing this thing” is a good way to respond to a differing political opinion, then there will always be people who are anonymous out of necessity. The lesson to learn from this whole thing, really, is don’t stoop to their level. Respond to discourse, even discourse you vehemently disagree with, in a way that doesn’t promote the idea of POTG as bloodthirsty, intolerant nuts. The more you refuse to engage this kind of bullshit with anger, the more ridiculous they look.

    That said, check out the hypocrisy here. I’m 100% sure that if BR had a headquarters and found it vandalized with pro-gun messages, they’d be crying “DOMESTIC TERRORISM, I FEEL UNSAFE” without a shred of irony.

  23. I went to South side of Chicago, you know where all those gun murders are happening, and it’s crazy, I didn’t see one Betsy RIOT sticker or any vandalism from them anywhere. It’s almost like they direct all their anti-gun venom exclusively at white, law-abiding, suburban gun owners. You know, the ones who aren’t committing murders and gun related crimes.

  24. Sorry, but the title of the murder lobby would more likely go the medical/pharmaceutical lobby, which represents the industry that kills conservatively 225,000 Americans/year.

  25. The Left turn into spoiled crybabies when they see they might lose. And on guns they are losing. If She loses the election it’s not going to be good for them. Ignoring is one option but if they get in your face or damage property then they need to be legally spanked. Or physically repelled as needed.

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