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A few days ago RECOIL Magazine posted three versions of a cover design for their next issue on their Instagram page. The idea was to let readers choose their favorite. All three were basically the same layout with varying color schemes. The featured image showed Top Shot champion and prominent Second Amendment advocate Chris Cheng holding a rifle and wearing a rainbow design American flag on his shirt.
Cheng, if you’re unaware, is openly gay. In fact, he announced that to the gun world in the pages of RECOIL back in 2013.
June, in case you hadn’t noticed, is also Pride Month. A friend at RECOIL tells us that the Cheng cover had been in the works for months and it was only a coincidence of the magazine’s editorial calendar that it was scheduled to run in June.
The problem is that publishing it in June makes RECOIL’s cover blend in and appear to be part of all of the other conspicuous corporate LGBTQ pandering that’s everywhere you look this month.
The real story here, though, is the reaction the cover provoked on Instagram. Commenters were, to say the least, decidedly negative, if not outright hostile to the rainbow flag image and the implied LGBTQ promotion.
As of this morning, there are over 4,000 comments under RECOIL’s Instagram post and until the magazine posted the following message two days ago, the large majority of the reactions were negative.
We couldn’t have written that last paragraph better ourselves. If you’ve read TTAG for any amount of time, you know that we, like RECOIL, believe that guns are for everyone. Broadening the base of gun owners in this country is not only good for promoting a healthy civil society, it also makes defending and extending gun rights and defeating efforts to disarm Americans far easier for all of us.
We’re Second Amendment absolutists and have always supported lawful gun ownership for everyone, whatever their personal proclivities may be. Gun control in this country is rooted in racism and discrimination. Promoting gun ownership to minorities of all kinds not only furthers the cause of gun rights, it also ensures people who count themselves among those groups can defend themselves and their families from those who would prey upon them.
More minorities and other “identity groups” are coming to that realization. That’s why we now have organizations like the National African American Gun Association, Pink Pistols, the Asian American Gun Owners of California, Armed Equality and many more.
The Pink Pistols’ motto is Armed Gays Don’t Get Bashed and after the Pulse Nightclub shooting, this meme became popular . . .
As we can attest, blog comment sections — and social media in particular — can, at times, devolve into venomous pits of electronic slime where the angry, the aggrieved, the unstable, and your basic basement-dwellers feel free to spew freely. They may be a minority of the general population, but they seem to be overrepresented in the online world, so take the blowback RECOIL got for what it’s worth.
By most official estimates, America has about 100 million gun owners. The real number is probably higher by a good fifty percent or more. Still, that doesn’t mean those of us who care about the right to keep and bear arms can afford to alienate or exclude anyone from exercising their Second Amendment rights and you won’t see any of that here. You certainly don’t have to agree with that stance, but if it upsets you, then neither TTAG — or RECOIL — is the place for you.
