Sponsors Flee From NRA After Corporate America Second-Guesses Association With Organization Promoting Mass Murder

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

25 February 18

Companies are severing ties with the National Rifle Association en masse.

f there’s one clear point that’s emerged from the Parkland shooting, it’s that change in gun-control policy is not going to come from Washington politicians. Exhibit A: even as he was being absolutely flayed by teenagers during a town-hall debate on Wednesday night, Senator Marco Rubio, whose constituents were murdered in the massacre, refused to say he would stop taking donations from the National Rifle Association, a group whose primary purpose is to influence gun legislation. But another notion that’s come out of the tragedy is that kids too young to vote are going to do the job their representatives—whose ability to walk upright sans spines continues to defy logic—will not. And because we’re living in the era of social media, they’re going to do it through the president’s favorite social-networking service.

After many of the Parkland survivors got the ball rolling by telling politicians exactly what they thought of their policies via Twitter, activist Michael Skolnik posted a list of companies offering discounts to N.R.A. members and requested that his followers “please tell them nicely to end their partnership,” using the hashtag #BoycottNRA. The hashtag quickly jumped to the top of the trending section, with concrete consequences: since then, Enterprise Holdings, Wyndham Hotel Group, security systems maker Simplisafe, LifeLock owner Symantec, and insurance giant MetLife have all cut ties with the organization. “Symantec has stopped its discount program with the National Rifle Association,” a company spokesperson told Bloomberg, while a spokesman from MetLife said, “we value all our customers but have decided to end our discount program with the N.R.A.”

Meanwhile, First National Bank of Omaha, which for the last decade has issued N.R.A.-branded cards that provide a cash-back bonus equivalent to the group’s annual membership fee, announced on Thursday that it will no longer serve as the “official credit card of the N.R.A.” BlackRock, the world‘s largest asset manager whose C.E.O. urged companies in January to prioritize social responsibility, told CNBC that in the wake of calls from investors who don’t want their money associated with the gun industry, the firm is “working with clients who want to exclude from their portfolios weapons manufacturers or other companies that don’t align with their values.” On Friday, insurer Chubb said it had notified the N.R.A three months ago that it would “discontinue participation in the N.R.A. Carry Guard insurance program under the terms of our contract.”

(Others have stood by the organization; “Our company provides discounted rooms to several large associations, including the N.R.A.,” Tim Hentschel, the co-founder of HotelPlanner.com, said in a statement, adding, “These associations greatly benefit our customers by buying discounted rooms from groups that might otherwise be charged a penalty by hotels for not using all of the rooms in their block,” which is apparently the worst thing that can happen to a person, short of not getting a chocolate on their pillow during turndown service.)

So far there’s little evidence that the Twitter-shaming campaign will have a huge effect on the N.R.A.’s bottom line—after all, they still have millions of paying members. But it has had a cultural impact, reinforcing the idea that the N.R.A. ought to be barred from polite society. It’s also more proof that any policy change will start not in Washington, but elsewhere; as Andrew Ross Sorkin opined on Monday, the way to really stick it to the N.R.A.—which, in an amazing bit of delusion, said this week that gun control advocates “don’t care about our schoolchildren” and are simply pushing their agenda to “make all of us less free”—is through the banks. In his column, Sorkin noted that since the finance industry collectively has “more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker,” it would make sense for credit-card companies, credit-card processors, and banks to effectively cut gun sellers off at the knees by changing the terms of their services to state that they “won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks”—something PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay did years ago.

It’s not like there isn’t precedent: earlier this month, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase banned using their cards for the purchase of cryptocurrencies. And from what we can tell, Bitcoin is just a little less dangerous than a semiautomatic rifle.