Super Bowl: Banning a gun commercial

The NFL’s advertising hypocrisy “reeks like a postgame locker room,” said Michelle Malkin in NationalReview.com. Every year, the Super Bowl sells millions of dollars of commercial time for vulgar and gratuitously violent ads. We’ve seen clowns pouring Bud Light up their butts; people being thrown out of high-rise buildings, electrocuted, and run over by buses; and violent M-rated video games. But last week, the NFL rejected an ad from the firearms company Daniel Defense for the 2014 Super Bowl. The ad depicts a veteran who protects his wife and baby by exercising his Second Amendment rights. “My family’s safety is my priority,” says the man. No violence or firearm is ever shown; the only sight of a gun is the AR-15 on the company logo—which Daniel Defense has generously offered to remove. Yet the NFL won’t budge. Maybe it’s time to boycott the Super Bowl, to protest the league’s “broadcasting double standards.”

The ad clearly violates the NFL’s ban on Super Bowl ads for “firearms, ammunition, or other weapons,” said Kavitha Davidson in Bloomberg.com, as well as its prohibition of “social causes/issue advocacy.” In the ad, the veteran says of his family, “No one has the right to tell me how to defend them,” and then Daniel Defense’s logo fills the screen. Taking a stand against gun control sure sounds a lot like issue advocacy to me. But the NFL only enforces that rule when it feels like it, said John Lott in FoxNews.com. Why was New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg allowed to buy Super Bowl ads the last two years advocating gun control? “Right now political correctness, not rules, seems to be the NFL’s guiding principle.”

But in the end, the NFL’s refusal to air the commercial is meaningless, said Adam Weinstein in Gawker.com. In fact, Daniel Defense may have tried to buy Super Bowl time expecting that the ad would be banned; in the subculture of “gun nuts,” disapproval by powerful forces is a “badge of honor.” The company’s forbidden AR-15 instantly becomes a “status object, a talisman” signifying defiance of “the socialist multiculti sheeple.” As the banned ad now goes viral on the Internet, it will sell more rifles to dudes in camouflage than a $4 million Super Bowl spot ever would. “Cock and lock! You’re a real man now. Quick, go watch some football!”

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