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NRA president: Lucy McBath only won House seat because she’s black

This is the House seat in Georgia that used to be held by Newt Gingrich.

By Oliver Willis - May 06, 2019
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Lucy McBath

The new head of the NRA claims that gun safety advocate Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) only won her recent election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District because she was a “minority female.”

“It is wrong to say like McBath said, that the reason she won was because of her anti-gun stance,” NRA president Carolyn Meadows told the Marietta Daily Journal in an interview published Sunday. “That didn’t have anything to do with it — it had to do with being a minority female. And the Democrats really turned out, and that’s the problem we have with conservatives — we don’t turn out as well.”

Meadows’ argument is not only racist and insulting; it’s also completely detached from reality.

It’s absurd to suggest that there is an inherent advantage for a black woman running for a congressional seat when in the entire history of the United States, there have only been 47 black women elected to Congress. The first one, Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY), was not elected until 1968.

The NRA’s attack is even more absurd when looking specifically at the seat McBath holds.

Every individual who has held that seat between 1827 to 2019 has been white. And other than Karen Handel, McBath’s immediate predecessor, they were all men.

Notable figures who have held the seat include Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Rep. Howell Cobb (D-GA) — who is best known as one of the founders of the pro-slavery Confederacy — and Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), who went on to a scandal-plagued tenure as Trump’s HHS Secretary.

And while the NRA desperately wishes that one of their most high-profile campaign losses wasn’t really about guns, it was in fact about guns.

McBath’s 17-year-old son Jordan Davis was murdered by a white man for playing music too loudly outside of a gas station in Florida in 2012. She said that life-altering moment was the “catalyst” for her decision to run for Congress in 2018.

In her campaign, McBath advocated for gun safety reform and was opposed by the incumbent Handel, who was bankrolled by the NRA in the race. When Trump spoke to the NRA’s 2017 annual meeting, he sung Handel’s praises, noting that “she’s totally for the NRA.”

Like many of the other candidates the NRA supported in 2018, Handel lost her race.

McBath has been a key figure in passing gun safety legislation in the House despite virulent opposition from the NRA.

The NRA is in retreat and losing ground politically while it is rocked internally by embarrassing scandals. In the midst of that chaos, it seeks to lash out at officials like McBath who are an example of its diminished power.

The NRA’s chosen weapons in that desperate act are racism and sexism.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation. 


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