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Along with President Trump, the NRA is in full-blown panic mode following a national wave of outrage spawned by the mass murder at Stoneman Douglas High School. The surviving students of the massacre have built a steadily growing movement thanks to savvy social media engagement, and an extremely impressive takedown of Sen. Marco Rubio and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch at Wednesday’s town hall discussion on CNN. While the NRA’s method of ignoring a tragedy and then turning it into an advancement for their cause may have worked in the past, it is currently blowing up in their faces, as evidenced by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s panicky, over-the-top speech at CPAC, and the fact that the gun lobby’s business partners are dropping them like flaming hot coals.

Following a tsunami of social media calls to boycott companies that have been offering deep discounts to NRA members, Enterprise, Alamo, and National car rentals have dropped their associations with the group.

As of Friday morning, both Avis and Hertz [see update below] rental companies are still in bed with the NRA, as well as FedEx. Feel free to tweet them about that here, here, and here.

Hotels such as Best Western and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts are also claiming they are dropping the NRA partnerships, as well as the First National Bank of Omaha which is one of the country’s largest banking institutions.

Here’s list of other businesses (and politicians) that have supported the NRA in the past, if you’d like to jump on the boycott train. And here’s more information about Oregon politicians who have accepted money from the gun lobby, and should be voted out of office at your earliest convenience.

UPDATE 9:32 am:

UPDATE 1:27 PM:
And now Hertz.

UPDATE 4:30 PM:

Bang bang, choo-choo train, let me see you shake that thang. Wm. Steven Humphrey is the editor-in-chief of the Portland Mercury and has held the job since 2000. (So don’t get any funny ideas.)

4 replies on “UPDATED: Businesses are Dropping Their Support of the NRA”

  1. This is indeed good news. There is one company that should also be pressured: Whole Foods.
    Amazon just bought Whole Foods and needs Whole Foods to prosper. Amazon streams the National Rifle Association channel, which is basically a barrage of hate speech against everyone who does not support their agenda. Boycotting or otherwise pressuring Whole Foods to tell Jeff Bezos to drop the NRA Channel is one way this tempeh-loving town can mess with the NRA. Otherwise, Amazon is just too big to boycott. Whole Foods is Jeff Bezo’s one soft target.

  2. Apple also streams National Rifle Association hate speech. One small thing you can do is contact Apple support and talk to a case manager. My case manager was nice. I politely explained that I was calling to urge Apple to drop the NRA channel. Right now, the tech giants are not joining Alamo and Delta in disassociating from the NRA. It’s time to remind them that consumers want to buy from companies that don’t stream hate speech.
    There is an Apple Support site that’s easy to find. Take 5 minutes and express yourself. Then take the survey about your experience- you will have an opportunity to communicate your position.

  4. FedEx is a stretch – their founder is a nutbag conservative.

    I would say the major difference between all these other companies and Amazon/Apple are that the other companies had business affiliations that offered discounts to NRA members (and thus presumably a kickback arrangement that gave money to the NRA when their members used those companies’ services). Apple and Amazon, in this context, are mostly just media platforms. I’d be happy if they dropped the NRA content channels, but it likely represents significantly less revenue than the member discount schemes.

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