April 13, 2019 - Richmond, Virginia, USA: The Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series teams take to the track for the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway in Richmond, Virginia. (Bigstock)
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News flash: the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, otherwise known as NASCAR, has a significant blue-collar following across America. Everyday Americans love their stock car racing almost as much as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and their Bibles.

NASCAR, however, in their own words, has made a “gradual shift” over the years and has now decided to ban advertisements for guns. Or at least, some guns.

NASCAR makes money by selling advertising. And businesses gain customers by marketing themselves. For gun-owning Americans, NASCAR racers’ uniforms, their cars, broadcasts and more make nice places for firearms sellers to market their wares to people who are highly likely to be customers.

However, as the Washington Examiner reports :

A pair of gun companies said this week that NASCAR rejected their rifle ads because of the racing company’s “gradual shift on guns.”

Dark Storm Industries said an ad it submitted featuring one of the company’s AR-15s was rejected and online retailer K-Var Corp. said an ad featuring an AK-47 and 9mm handgun was also rejected. Both said a NASCAR advertising agency solicited ads from them for NASCAR publications. They submitted ads but were told NASCAR would not accept them.

Gunmaker Dark Storm Industries called NASCAR out for their newfound wokeness, saying “NASCAR has turned their back on the overwhelming majority of their fan base.”

 

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NASCAR decided to turn their back on their customer base, joining the likes of Yeti, Dick’s and Under Armour. We were approached by a NASCAR publication eager to earn our business, but after submitting our ad it was immediately rejected, stating that we cannot depict “assault weapons”… whatever those are. We resubmitted the ad after adding a large ‘CENSORED’ bar over the rifle, with a tag reading “This publication rejected our ad”. This too was rejected by NASCAR. They said they did not like that we called them out. We resubmitted a third time, with a tag line reading “Visit www.Dark-Storm.com to find out why!”. This was again rejected. They did not like the words “FIND OUT WHY”. As we have learned, NASCAR has made a “gradual shift” but this doesn’t seem very gradual to us. It seems as though NASCAR has turned their back on the overwhelming majority of their fan base in the most embarrassing way possible. #nascar

A post shared by Dark Storm Industries (@darkstormindustries) on

Of course, the AR-15 style rifle depicted in Dark Storm’s ad has the distinction of America’s favorite rifle. In fact, Americans own more AR-15s than America’s best-selling pickup trucks, the Ford F-150.

Yet NASCAR, home to a huge percentage of Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, wants to ban ads featuring America’s favorite rifle? That would be like banning ads for motor oil or beer.

May 18, 2019 – Concord, North Carolina, USA: Alex Bowman (88) advances onto the Monster Energy All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina. (Bigstock)

Dark Storm’s experience mirrors that of K-Var. They received an email from Sunny Berlin, the art director for National Event Publications who apparently handles NASCAR’s advertising. She wrote to them:

We just heard back from NASCAR on a number of gun related ads and unfortunately due to a gradual shift in their position on guns, these ads must be edited/changed– especially those that are depicted as assault style rifles/sniper rifles.  They are still open to some ads featuring some of the less controversial gun accessories, concealed carry, or classes.

Can you supply a new ad that would fit more along these guidelines? NASCAR will then review again.

She gave them a 24-hour window to send a new ad. K-Var told her to pound sand.

Yet some firearms sponsors are A-OK with NASCAR. Just last month prominent rifle and shotgun maker Henry announced that . . .

Henry Repeating Arms and Road America have reached an agreement naming Henry Repeating Arms as the title sponsor of the 2020 NASCAR Xfinity Series race at the world-renowned 4-mile, 14-turn road course. The Henry 180, scheduled for August 8, 2020, takes place less than 300 miles away from Henry Repeating Arms’ 138,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in Rice Lake, WI.

So NASCAR’s OK with some rifles, just not the scary black kind.

Radio host Mark Walters, host of Armed American Radio, calls himself a life-long NASCAR fan. He had this to say about NASCAR’s new policy banning America’s favorite rifle, again from the Examiner:

“Go ahead NASCAR, try to fill the stands with a bunch of David Hogg, Moms Demand Action, Everytown for Gun Safety, urban, progressive, skinny jean wearing, soy sipping, man-bun wearing, Antifa loving, gun-hating socialists,” Walters wrote. “I won’t be around to see how that turns out for you.”

Four words, NASCAR: Get woke, go broke.

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79 COMMENTS

    • I support nascar in this. Gun rights have taken a back seat to the AK and AR. So have raffles, the come and take it flag, pickup back windows, and gazillions of gear ads that attach themselves to the AR. So much so that anyone new to guns would think the are only two rifles, ARs and everything else.

      At some point we will need to face a decision and admit the intoxicating effects of the AR have derailed our collective 2A core beliefs. We are in an abusive relationship with the AR and it is threatening the life of every other gun with its reckless behavior.

        • No, he may be ON to something, there.

          My AR whispers to me on dark, windy nights, crooning the message “Shooooooooot me. SHOOOOOOOOOT ME!’ I don’t think that it wants me to shoot it in the sense of putting a bullet through it, but you never know with the deeply-disturbed psychotic beast that is an AR.

          I also have a Glock that subliminally tells me to stick it, unholstered, into my waistband with the muzzle pointed at my Naughty Bits, or to shove it back into a holster with my finger on the trigger, or to try to disassemble it without first checking the chamber; It MAY be trying to kill me, but I’m made of sterner stuff than the average InnerCityYute or other self-gelding fellow, and have so far resisted its Siren Call.

          Of course, 1911s compel their owners to carry them on their hips in public in fancy tooled-leather holsters, and SIG 320s, in their great Evil, convince their owners to drop them on hard surfaces; MANY guns have such magical powers, if we only recognize and accept them.

          Fact!

      • So what in the hell are you doing on a site like this then, seeing is how you seem to hate guns so much? Shouldn’t you be on a site featuring David Hogg as the leader, and his ilk? You can pick and chose with him which Constitutional rights we serfs are “allowed” to have by your sub-standards (insert sarcasm). Or, as with Orwell’s, “Animal Farm”, except substitute “animal” for “gun”: Some guns are equal, but some more equal than others.

      • “At some point we will need to face a decision and admit the intoxicating effects of the AR have derailed our collective 2A core beliefs.”

        This is one of the more foolish comments ever made on TTAG. If you intended it to be sarcasm you should know that irony doesn’t communicate well in ascii. That’s why an identifier like //SARC// is such a useful way of signalling your meaning.

      • Excuse me maj dumb ass… people are the cause of the shootings etc. not the
        guns. The gun is an inanimate object or tool. Take away the guns and they’ll use
        Cars, trucks, knives, hammers, whatever. This is what happens when you have,
        government education and the media controlling what people are hearing. Who said,
        If you say something long enough people will eventually believe it.
        So…….. don’t pay any attention to the facts or evidence, just believe the first thing you hear. What a genius……

      • Nothing quite like turning left for hours at a time! It obviously addles the cognitive portions of the brain. Once addled, the final outcome is blind compliance with the mentally disturbed political left. Don’t deny it, we all saw this coming even before Jr retired. When was the last time they referenced the ‘Young guns’? OH the horror!

    • Once I stopped watching NASCAR and NFL on Sundays, I realized that weekends are much more enjoyable. There are plenty of things to do that are a better use of my time than watching either sport, such as spending time with family, going to the range, sorting my socks, or picking lint out of my belly button. Go enjoy your weekend, don’t be a slave to entities that don’t support you!

      • I quit watching NASCAR after the restrictor plates were mandatory thus creating traffic jams on the track all the while bragging on their interest in track safety. They have so many rules that the drivers need lawyers riding with them.

        • Holy time machine batman. That was FORTY NINE YEARS AGO. You’re just making lame rationalization.

          NASCAR “modern era” is just a lame American 10yr fad that has lasted for 30yr (see also RAP/hiphop notmusic).

      • Youi can spend more time at the range, either increasing your own skills or, better yet, teaching someone else the joys of shooting. Or sit at the reloading bench, or cleaning firearms.

        I never fell into the couch potato syndrome, made no sense to me watching a bunch of room temperature IQ millionaires chase each other around for a couple of hours while I’d sit, drink beer, eat and get fat. Works for some, though. It’d be great to see what happened to the NFL happen to NASCAR. They have, BTW, also rejected NRA’s sponsorship car as well.

  1. We thought Brian France was the problem with NASCAR’s dropping in ratings and attendance. It looks like the problems are deeper now that he is gone.

  2. I went to a NASCAR race once, it was the worst sporting event I’ve ever attended.

    I left half way through the race with a headache and completely bored out of my mind; I will never go to another one.

    • A buddy of mine went to the Michigan race several years ago and he said that where he sat, the cars would zip by in like 10~20 seconds and then you could get up and go et some food or to the bathroom and be back in time for them to come zooming by again.
      The races tend to last 3 hours or more so I couldn’t imagine how boring that race could have been sitting down by the track like that.
      He’s since given up on watching it, which is surprising since a few years ago you couldn’t even get him out of the house when a race was going on. His wife could have been having a heart attack or giving birth and he wouldn’t care, he might call an ambulance on a commercial break, but that’s about it.

  3. Never cared for NASCAR but it is damned stupid to be telling your core customer base you disapprove of them. In any case, this is further erosion of the right to keep and bear arms. If retailers cannot advertise or transact business, the ability to obtain arms is weakened.

    So shame on NASCAR.

    After that I looked up these companies NASCAR rejected:
    https://www.dark-storm.com/
    “Behind Enemy Lines – Dark Storm Industries, or DSI, is a New York-based firearm manufacturer” … “A new state-of-the-art indoor shooting range, the first on Long Island in over 30 years. ”

    On Long Island? Seriously? That’s quite an achievement. If I didn’t have all the AR’s I can afford right now, I’d be interested.

    K-Var didn’t interest me much, just another online seller. Major emphasis on AK’s, not my area of interest. Based out of Las Vegas NV.

  4. I can promise NASCAR that the folks who sneer at AR shooting folks in fly over country are never going to watch their races, and will sneer at the advertisers who try to appeal to those knuckle dragging race car nuts. You are never going to win that bunch over any more than the NRA ever did.

  5. NASCAR has been trying to shed its “redneck” image for over a decade. This is just a small part of that effort. That image is what built racing and made it a billion dollar enterprise, but NASCAR knows that society is shifting and their Southern working class fan base is becoming vilified by some pretty powerful entities. Instead of championing and supporting the people who made NASCAR rich, NASCAR is abandoning them in hopes of replacing them.

    • Gordon is gone…hard to identify with billy-bob and jim-bob….used to offer an interesting cast of characters and slam-bang action…not so much anymore….once got into an interesting discussion with some good ole’ boys at the brickyard who maintained blacks weren’t qualified to drive at this level…guess they never heard of the current world champion…

    • But replacing them with what? Owning and liking guns is sort of a litmus test for a demographic who owns tools, likes and can work on cars, and who find the idea of car-racing conducive enjoyment. People like urban cosmopolites who don’t or who can’t do these sorts of things are highly likely to be culturally alienated from car-racing..

  6. I have never watched a NASCAR race & never will. That’s the trouble with BIG MONEY Sports they always abandon their base for the left. I have never understood how this can happen in this country!!

  7. Wait a minute. The first company is based in NY, manufactures in NY, has a range in NY, and pays taxes in NY? I am not a fan of NASCAR but come on. If you want to bitch about NASCAR then at least move to a gun friendly state like Magpul and others did.

    • Huh? NASCAR won’t let the company advertise, so your solution is for the company to move to a different state? How would moving make any difference at all? Is NASCAR going to start running the companies ads if they live somewhere else? What a strange this to post.

  8. Why do these orgs listen to execs who don’t enjoy the product, don’t know anyone who enjoys the product, don’t live where anyone enjoys the product and generally hold a disdain for the product? Seems like they’d do better to pander to fans rather than execs who care more about social engineering than selling a product. See Gillette. These execs are happy to see the company fail because they already got their money. Whoevers asinine idea it was to tie razors to toxic masculinity doesn’t have to pay back what Gillette paid them for that campaign. Watch out NASCAR. Viewership isn’t what it used to be and shitting on the remaining fans doesn’t seem like a good strategy.

    • I use to volunteer for WMRRA. (Washington Motorcycle Road Racing Association)
      We used to make a fair bit of fun at a race where you only had a left turn…

      For racing… Try Moto GP.

      And since no one else has said it
      “You can’t spell NASCAR without AR” .. Sorry.

  9. Piss on NASCAR! They’ve been about political correctness for decades. At one time they were an organization in which the drivers were about the fans. Now, it’s about the fame and fortune.

  10. Tacti-tards are just as bad as “fudds”. Oh no! Someone doesn’t like the same things I do, I must cry and whine like a special snowflake.

  11. The list of sports, retailers,etc. that have bowed down to political correctness and given up on characteristics that made the USA the greatest place to live on Earth keeps growing. It’s sometimes inconvenient to avoid the products and services offered by the anti-2nd crowd but we manage. Loved NASCAR & heading to the track for a race. Used to often shop Dick’s. Neither is on my list of destinations anymore!

  12. Dropped NASCAR years ago. No NFL or NBA for me either. Actually, I am planning to tell Dish Network to cut my service. Nothing on worth watching!!

  13. I’m sure we’ll hear some people say they’re going to boycott nascar etc etc much like we’ve heard about other sports like football. And much like with football, it won’t make any difference. These companies are just that. They’re not your friend and they’re not trying to make the world a better place. They’re looking to avoid anything controversial unless it pays well enough. And it doesn’t.

    • I notice that a fair number of new executives working at these companies now wear man-buns. Any self-respecting, hetro-male who has learned to put his hair up in a bun is not someone who is going to have a passionate interest visceral sports like car-racing. Oh, and Hannibal, just out of curiosity . . . have cop-shops developed policies that allow man-buns on LEOs? Just wonderin’ . . .

  14. NASCAR is on life support now, maybe they could just a bunch of self driving cars to go around in a circle, and then interview a millineal snowflake and pleas all the cry babies!

      • Another scam for Musk to “invent”. Great place for his electric self-driving pieces of shit Teslas. Partner with Duber. With them wouldn’t even need to pretend that the race “advertising” made fiscal sense.

    • I think a self-driving race would be interesting. They probably already exist since racing is where all our automotive technologies are created and perfected. Create software and hardware that can navigate a car around Laguna Seca at 150 MPH and it should have no problem driving you to work.

    • Agreed. It’s gone downhill since Earnhardt got killed at Daytona. One might even argue it’s been “meh” since the mid-eighties. IMO, nothing now but cookie-cutter cars and “pop-star”drivers. Growing up on in the Deep South, I remember watching it a lot in the seventies as a teenager into the eighties; used to enjoy it then.

      The old “Birmingham Gang….”

  15. “half measures availed us nothing”
    “you were neither hot nor cold so i spit you out”
    its not going to take very much anti gun antics on the part of nascar to send fans packing
    theres lots of other racing out there…
    for me personally if i wanted to watch a bunch of people just go around in circles and smash into a wall at high speed and send debris flying everywhere i would just turn on cnn or msnbc

  16. Corporate censorship continues. It’s easier to take something away when people are stopped from seeing it, experiencing it, or thinking about it outside of the narratives fed to them by power.

  17. I would get upset, but i haven’t watched a NASCAR race since the Brickyard 400 in 2008 when they effed with the cars so much that tires were blowing after 10 laps. NASCARS solution? Mandatory cautions every 8 laps.

    Im not alone. Bristol is struggling to fill seats after about 50 yrs of consecutive sellouts. Other tracks are just removing entire grand stands.

    So I guess the point is that if NASCAR is attempting to change its culture then no one will be around to witness it.

  18. Apparently they think they’re big and rich enough to snub their customers and do what the execs really want to do, in their hearts. Well, bless their hearts. I never gave a rats ass, myself. I can drive around in Idaho and watch people doing the same things on the streets as they do in the tracks,bwith the same results 🙂

  19. NASCAR hasn’t been relevant for over 40 years. Multi Millionaire owners and lawyers have ruined the “sport”.
    Take me back to the days of Smokey Yunick and the like, when a little “creative engineering” was the norm.

  20. People get too much money for kicking balls, bouncing balls, throwing balls and now, driving in cricles for hours on end. These people need to be reminded that they don’t exist because of advertiser payouts. They exist because of their audience, who is willing to put up with their advertisements. Seems like making left hand turns is another sport that forgot its audience.

    If you want to give your primary consumer the middle finger, get woke, go broke.

    • NO they exist because corporate suckers believe the BS that ad agencies feed to them about eyeballs, clicks, impressions, etc. NONE of which actually increases net income of anyone but the ad “business”. But if you’re a a middle aged frat party boy you want to believe and you’re into the post game/race/etc nonsense with pretty young hospitality girls (see as “Monster” above).

  21. Ok- nascar and the France family have been mismanaging nascar since 2000. For some reason, there was a surge in popularity of nascar. Maybe after 9/11 people just liked the invocation, the rise in evangelical Christianity heresies, and all that. Also Indy car imploded at that time with the IRL/CART split. F1 was not televised in the US- so NASCAR became a monopoly. Rappers were wearing the mark martin viagra jackets! Redneck cultural hegemony was realized! Rejoice!

    Then the numbers started to decline a bit, so nascar started to lots of things to try to cater to the “casual nascar fan” while upsetting the core base.

    These include:
    -end of southern 500
    -car of tomorrow (looked like fast and furious)
    -the race to the chase
    -lucky dog pass
    -Toyota
    -the nascar diversity program
    -banning confederate flags
    -restrictor plates
    -green white checkered on yellow end of race restarts
    -Buddy drafting
    -I probably forgot more, but it all went to hell

    I was a big nascar fan for a long time, but I can’t even explain the new rules. Plus, all the cool old drivers either died, retired, – and the new ones suck. Dale Earnhardt not graduating high school and being sponsored by Winston cigarettes and realTree camo; has been replaced by the very punchable face of Kyle Busch and MONSTER energy drink- gross!

    NASCAR is only going to hemorange more fans with this.

    I want American cars, chewing tobacco, white people, prayer, guns, camo, subtle racism, confederate flags, and bulemic women.

    Next it’s going to be the WNASCAR.

    • Damn right

      The stage racing and giving the already dumb Chase format the silly name “playoffs” finally killed it for me. This, and the goalpost moving and rule changes every single year. I just can’t muster up the energy to care anymore. This debacle with AR-15’s is an afterthought for me.

        • No. We need it. I remember going to watch the race at Sonoma / sears point / Infineon back when it was still Winston cup. It was good to have Chevron corporate suite next to confederate flags and rednecks with missing teeth. Today, those chevron execs will never even encounter a Trump voter.

          Everyone is more insulated in their bubbles. It’s not good.

          It’s good for you kids to see a fat man spitting tobacco yelling “black flag that chink” to the Asian driver.

          Celebrate diversity! White lives matter! Put Brian France in jail.

    • A preference for women with bulimia. Genius t-man. Almost as good as “Netflix-Americans”.

      Also- the points for winning the half way / stages.

      Why can they just do:
      -20 race season
      – take off the restrictor plates. I wanna see 225mph on talledega.
      – adopt IRL rules (no playoffs/stages/lucky dog/green white checkered, etc.)
      -make the cars cheaper, closer to stock

      This is not hard. Remember when F1 almost died after
      -Ferrari dominating
      – poor teams having no chance
      – aero grip over mechanical grip
      – no passing and grooved tires

      People went to NASCAR because it was exciting. Sorry, but I want to see fights, cars flying into the stands, passing in the grass, and fat drivers.

  22. I never really watched NASCAR, however I watched Intimidator Dale faithfully. NASCAR itself was just an unimportant side show that gave me time to take a leak.

    When Dale hit his head and died, that was all she wrote for me.
    “Stock Car Auto Racing”???? Are you kidding me?

    Being a hard-core kinda guy, the slightest infringements on the 2nd Amendment show me immediately who the traitors to the Constitution are, whether in the government, corporations or general population.
    At this point, I fear the traitors outnumber the patriots. Heck, even Ruger was a traitor in the past, but they finally realized their error.

  23. It sure seems that nearly all sports, news media, filmmakers, broadcast or cable TV, and radio sources are rapidly losing market share to personally-tailored online providers.

    I think this isn’t some sort of political shift or whatever, so much as simple money; because it’s always about money. As the old business models fail, the managers become desperate & grasp at anything they can…and that means they become highly vulnerable to infiltration & convergence by political interests. Specifically wealthy leftist Utopian political interests. These people have more money than sense (obviously) and by providing a lifeline, not only offer the target a juicy bait, but also concentrate & increase their control on that little facet of media in the process (and deny access to it by the opposition). The idea is they can create a wall of inescapable propaganda to bombard the populace into submission, faster than these sources lose favor & die out on their own. The best antidote is to simply move on & adapt when a source has been compromised. That way, the good leftist money is thrown after bad, and the purchase goes south even faster than if it had been allowed to die on its own.

    It’d be like the KKK bailing out all the dying buggie-whip manufacturers after the Model T was rolled out, so they can have a monopoly on whippings.

  24. Just another reason I left that sport many, many years ago. I’m sure they don’t care at all and that is fine. I also stopped buying any of their merch. Just like I stopped shopping at the Dick’s and don’t buy any woke Nike products. My own personal choice to not financially support those who go against what I believe. NFL, I’m looking at you next. With the kneeling and other social justice warrior bs. Just play ball.

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