About the same time that National Football League owners were announcing their new policy about kneeling during the National Anthem, a leading grassroots Second Amendment organization was calling for a boycott of the Seattle Seahawks because owner Paul Allen just donated $1 million to a Washington State gun control campaign.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms –coincidentally based in Bellevue, on the opposite shore of Lake Washington from Seattle – said gun owners can send a message to Allen by not supporting his team.
“Paul Allen can buy football teams, he can purchase basketball teams, pay for expensive yachts, and finance the Museum of Pop Culture,” Gottlieb said, “but Constitutional rights are not for sale. By closing their pocketbooks and checkbooks, the Second Amendment community can remind him that people vote not only with their ballots, but with their wallets.”
Allen, who also owns the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team – Oregon gun owners are also under attack with an initiative drive to ban so-called “assault weapons” – also contributed to the Initiative 594 campaign four years ago.
Gottlieb, who also is founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, acknowledged in a SAF fund raising appeal earlier this week that “Gun Grabbers are using the horrific shooting tragedy at the high school in Texas to push their prohibition agenda,” adding that “they have raised over $3 million dollars to attack your Second Amendment Rights.”
He was alluding to the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility and their newest gun control scheme, Initiative 1639. This is the measure that would ban the sale of semi-auto modern sporting rifles (MSR) to young adults aged 18-20, require so-called “enhanced background checks” and a 10-day waiting period for buying such rifles, and so-called “safe storage” requirements that carry criminal penalties for violations.
“In recent years, the gun prohibition lobby has raised and spent small fortunes to push their anti-rights agenda,” Gottlieb noted. “Big bucks social warriors such as Allen, Michael Bloomberg, Nick Hanauer and others are using their wealth as a weapon to incrementally rob citizens of their constitutionally-protected rights.
“It’s time for Evergreen State gun owners to remind Paul Allen that financing attacks on rights protected by the state and federal constitutions has consequences.”—CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb
Support for NFL teams in general lagged last year over the controversy involving kneeling players during the National Anthem. Players say they have a right to kneel in protest to what they consider bad government policies.
Gottlieb said a boycott would remind the NFL that would-be fans also have the right to spend their money elsewhere.
“Not buying game tickets or team paraphernalia,” he observed,” not supporting game sponsors and telling them why will send a clear signal to Allen, who has employed his own private security staff, that there is a flag on this play with a long yardage penalty.”
