Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Miller:Bloomberg group blasts billboard ‘assault rifle’ as American as apple pie and baseball


Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, which is funded by New York City billionaire Mike Bloomberg, wants billboards taken down for depicting “assault rifles” as being as American as apple pie and baseball. The ad for Slide Fire, a firearms parts manufacturer in Texas, is up in several cities, including Chicago.

Nicole Chen, the head of the gun-control group’s Illinois chapter, said she was “shocked” that the ad “removes ‘mom’ from the idiom ‘as American as baseball, apple pie and mom,’ and replaces it with an assault rifle.”

Ms. Chen added that, “It’s particularly upsetting that children in Chicago, a city that has struggled horribly with gun violence, are being exposed to such a harmful message.”

The billboard says “Pure American” under three photos of a baseball glove, a pie and an AR-type rifle. The ad copy and design was done in-house by Slide Fire.
The manufacturer deliberately chose President Obama’s hometown for one of its billboards because of the city’s high crime rate and extremely restrictive gun-control laws.

“Chicago is the number one place in the country that shows gun laws don’t work,” Laura Shackelford, the chief executive manager of Slide Fire, told me in an interview Monday.


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