NRA Drops Lawsuit, Accepts San Francisco City Council Declaring Them a "Domestic Terrorist Organization"
November 9, 2019
By Walter Einenkel
On November 7, the National Rifle Association dismissed their lawsuit against the city of San Francisco for branding the Second Amendment cult a “domestic terrorist organization.” NRA officials said that they had gotten the satisfaction they were looking for and therefore pulled their lawsuit. Of course, as the San Francisco Chronicle explains, that is a strange bit of spin. After SF Mayor London Breed explained that the resolution did not require the city to limit its interactions with vendors that did business with the NRA, the NRA responded by saying they would not drop their litigation until the city “officially withdraws its unconstitutional threat and makes amends for the harm suffered by the NRA.”
Of course, that hasn’t happened. The NRA is still deemed a “domestic terrorist organization” by San Francisco. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera released a statement calling the NRA’s decision to dismiss their “frivolous lawsuit,” a good one, but also warned that “If the NRA doesn’t want to be publicly condemned for its actions, it should stop sabotaging common sense gun safety regulations that would protect untold numbers of Americans every year, like universal background checks, an assault weapons ban and restrictions on high-capacity magazines.”
In September, the San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to declare the National Rifle Association a domestic terror organization. The announcement called out the organization for its disproportionate amount of influence on national and state policies, its willingness to promote disinformation about gun violence, its unwillingness to even heed its own membership’s wishes while taking on more and more extreme positions, and its complicity in arming individuals who are dangerous to the American public.
The San Francisco City Council resolution reads:
RESOLVED, That the City and County of San Francisco intends to declare the National Rifle Association a domestic terrorist organization; and, be it
FURTHER RESOLVED, That the City and County of San Francisco should take every reasonable step to assess the financial and contractual relationships our vendors and contractors have with this domestic terrorist organization; and, be it
FURTHER RESOLVED, That the City and County of San Francisco should take every reasonable step to limit those entities who do business with the City and County of San Francisco from doing business with this domestic terrorist organization; and be it
FURTHER RESOLVED, That the City and County of San Francisco should encourage all other jurisdictions, including other cities, states, and the federal government, to adopt similar positions.
This decision led the NRA to huff and puff and promise to blow everybody’s houses down. Within a week, the NRA filed a lawsuit against the City by the Bay, saying they were discriminating against political viewpoints, and that while the distinction of domestic terrorist organization was a “frivolous insult,” it would also "pose a nonfrivolous constitutional threat."
Courthouse News reported, back in September, that the Second Amendment looney toons were going to have a difficult time trying to prove a case, since the resolution didn’t bind city officials to actively boycott the NRA. Lawyers explained that even if San Francisco officials did indeed boycott vendors who dealt with the NRA in some capacity, the NRA itself wouldn’t have much of a case as they would be arguing that they were the victims of a “secondary boycott.”
All of this is now a moot point as the NRA has bigger fish to fry, as they continue to battle it out in the courts and deal with internal and external investigations into their dubious financial management practices.
Posted with permission