If I were Mr.Brownell I would cut off my funding of community projects immediately. See how long what sounds like an economic stranglehold would take to change the communities attitude.
If I were Mr.Brownell I would cut off my funding of community projects immediately. See how long what sounds like an economic stranglehold would take to change the communities attitude.
I would as well, or make them overtly geared toward the shooting sports, etc.
[FONT=&]The third thing is that they don’t have a problem with guns. “We all agree people have the right to own guns, and that using them for hunting is great and that’s fine,” said Tim Dobe, an associate professor of religion at Grinnell College. “No one challenges that[/FONT].[FONT=&]”[/FONT]
[FONT=&]But over the last few years, the gun company in the middle of everything here became harder to ignore. In December 2012, The Los Angeles Times [/FONT]reported that[FONT=&] Brownells sold several years’ worth of high-capacity ammunition magazines in the 72 hours after the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. (There have been more than 100 F.B.I.-designated active shooter incidents since.)[/FONT]
[FONT=&]The facility’s grand opening, complete with a ribbon cutting atttended [/FONT][FONT=&]by the governor of Iowa and Lou Ferrigno, took place in June 2016, the day before the Pulse nightclub shooting. The Pulse shooter had armed himself with a semiautomatic rifle and a Glock pistol. Brownells had given away prizes, including similar firearms, about 12 hours earlier.
[/FONT][FONT=&]This, says Kirsten Klepfer, the pastor of Grinnell’s First Presbyterian Church, “woke me up.” A week after the shooting, she preached an uncomfortable sermon at the Sunday morning service. “If we think there’s no connection between Orlando and Brownells, we’re probably not thinking hard enough,” she said.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]Ms. Klepfer, the church’s leader for over a decade, may be the person with the strongest principled objection to what she sees as the community’s complicity in the firearms industry. She may also be the person who struggles least with the moral complexity and social risk of raising such objections. “There’s a reason we’re not a big church,” she said, “and it’s mostly me.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&]In June 2018, representatives of the Concerned Alumni group, on campus for their 50th reunion, delivered a petition to the college on behalf of 500 signatories. They asked the college to reject further gifts from Mr. Brownell, because he represents the N.R.A.’s “deleterious impacts on the quality of American life.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&]Ms. Miller, too, likes the Brownells. She also says their family’s comfort comes at the expense of her family’s own. In November 1991, her mother, Ann Rhodes, was a vice president at the University of Iowa when a physics graduate student shot and killed three department faculty members and a postdoctoral researcher and injured two administrators in another building, before killing himself. Ms. Rhodes, who was also the university’s spokeswoman and tasked with handling the aftermath, was among the first to come upon a wounded colleague, who died the following day.[/FONT][FONT=&]Ms. Miller was just an infant at the time. She grew up knowing that the shooting had a lasting effect on her mother’s physical and mental health, and on her family.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]“I’m going to inherit my family’s farm,” she said. “But if my family’s farm was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people every year, I think I would find a different livelihood.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&]Last month, a group of Senate Democrats asked Mr. Brownell and six other N.R.A. leaders for details about a 2015 trip to Moscow. There, the delegation met Maria Butina, who was charged last month with being a covert Russian agent in an investigation unrelated to the probe by Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel.
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[FONT=&]After the Parkland, Fla., shooting in February, stickers with the Brownells logo and the text “Brownells, where school shootings are good for business” appeared on walls and fixtures across downtown Grinnell.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]Mr. Dobe characterized their message this way: “Now that you’re the president of the N.R.A., we think you kind of owe us a conversation.”[/FONT]
I wonder how much he was donating in the hopes to keep the criticism down over the years.