MSNBC Poll: 84% say Kroger shoppers should be allowed to carry handguns

MSNBC, a well-known media bastion of anti-gun rights extremism, has opened an online poll presumably hoping to provide fuel to help their buddies at billionaire bully Michael Bloomberg's Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America's latest campaign to intimidate an American corporation to prohibit their customers from exercising their Second Amendment rights. (His previous campaigns against corporations have failed to result in the posting of one new "no-guns" sign at any of the corporations they have targeted, including Starbucks, Target, Sonic, Chipotle, Chili's, Wendy's, and Jack In the Box.)

Unfortunately for MSNBC and Mr. Bloomberg, as a new online poll proves, even readers on that left-leaning website support the rights of law-abiding citizens to bear arms.

As of late afternoon Monday on September 8, with more than 29,000 votes cast, the poll was running 84% in favor of continuing to allow Kroger customers their right to carry.

This is just the latest in a long series of embarrassments for Bloomberg's astroturf gun control groups.

Last week, the Washington Times reported that more than 57,000 businesses were putting out "welcome" signs for gun owners in the wake of Bloomberg's failed attempts to intimidate a handful of corporations to put up "no-guns" signs.

On August 12, pro-gun rights Milwaukee Co. Sheriff David Clarke won re-election, despite Bloomberg having spent $150,000 in an attempt to defeat him.

In late July, another Bloomberg front group, Everytown for Gun Safety, released a t.v. commercial which was intended to scare women into supporting gun control. Instead, it had the opposite effect. The commercial depicts a woman calling 911 as her ex-husband kicks in the door, grabs her child and puts a gun to her head. The problem for the people in "Everytown" is that almost NO ONE in real towns who watch the commercial came away with the idea that everything would have turned out ok if only the bad guy didn't have a gun. Instead, most viewers found themselves wishing that the mother in the commercial DID have a gun (seeing as the Everytown commercial writers saw fit to mention that the restraining order she had obtained sure didn't help). Indeed, three out of four panelists on ABC's The View (not known as a gun-friendly show by any means) said they thought the video made a better case for why women need to keep a gun with them.

At the time it was launched in April, and despite the fact that he can afford to hire the finest public relations experts available, Bloomberg's $50 million "Everytown" campaign forgot to secure a Facebook page - and had to threaten to sue when a Second Amendment supporter created one himself, using it to show what REAL gun safety is. The page accumulated more than 20,000 fans in just a couple of days, and state-level "off-shoot" pages began popping up all over the country.

Next, one of the group's board members, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, quit the group, citing his discomfort with some of the political work the group was planning.

Later, the group made headlines when former MAIG boss Mark Glaze admitted to the Wall Street Journal that “it is a messaging problem” for gun control groups like Everytown “when a mass shooting happens and nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting.”

Soon thereafter, the group released a list of 74 supposed school shootings that had occurred since the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. It was soon revealed by journalist Charles C. Johnson, however, that not only did some of them not take place on campuses but that “fewer than 7 of the 74 school shootings listed by #Everytown are mass shootings,” that one or more probably didn’t happen at all, that at least one was actually a case of self-defense, and that 32 could be classified as “school shootings” only if, as National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke put it, we are to twist the meaning of the term beyond all recognition.

And now 84% of people who have voted on MSNBC's website say they believe Kroger shoppers should be allowed to carry handguns.

Perhaps his multiple PR failures despite having recently invested $50 million in the gun control effort are why Bloomberg has announced he will be returning to private business - it's the one place where he has had some success.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Secretary, BFA PAC Vice Chairman, and an NRA-certified firearms instructor. He is the editor of BuckeyeFirearms.org, which received the Outdoor Writers of Ohio 2013 Supporting Member Award for Best Website.