Just when the media starts to accept that the gun culture is the mainstream, a knuckle-dragging troglodyte like Crockett Keller decides to crash the party. Keller runs a gun shop in Mason, Texas and teaches the state CHL course. In a recent radio advertisement, he set some fairly prejudicial ground rules in his student selection process.
If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class. You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law. Also, if you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class. Once again, with no shame, I am Crockett Keller.
Guess which story is getting more attention? Give yourself a cupcake if you guessed it was Keller.
Accusations of racism against the gun culture were quite prevalent in the 1990’s. When the media caught wind of the fact that Timothy McVeigh was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the NRA, they did their best to equate the two organizations. To this day, there are still some good but uninformed people out there who assume that this is Lily White Glenn Beck Country, and that anyone else is unwelcome.
It doesn’t take a crowd of marching skinheads to reinforce that impression. It just takes tacit approval of Mr. Keller’s cretinism, and I’m sure there are more than a few people out there chuckling and nodding their heads in approval of him.
Keller’s doesn’t seem to be on the verge of recanting or apologizing. In fact, he’s standing by his assertions.
The fact is, if you are a devout Muslim, then you cannot be a true America. Why should I arm these people to kill me? That’s suicide
I can assure him with some certainty that there are no Muslims lining up to take his class at all, much less to kill him. I know quite a few Muslims, and none of them are looking to kill anybody. Maybe they didn’t get the memo.
Or maybe they’re just taking classes from people who aren’t drooling bigots.
We may not have to worry long, however. Instructors are certified and overseen by the Texas Department of Safety. The government takes a dim view of discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, and his certification is already under investigation by the DPS.
Mr. Keller also advertises that he’s an NRA-certified instructor. According to the Trainer’s Ethics Guide,
Trainers should respect and protect human civil rights, and should not knowingly participate in or condone unfair discriminatory practices. (…) Trainers do not engage in discrimination on any basis prescribed by law.
When the dust settles, he might not be teaching much of anything, at least to the shooting community. What he’s passed on to his children is anyone’s guess.
In his defense, he has claimed that Islam is incompatible with our system of government. I’ve heard this before. Given a literal reading of the Quran, that’s true to some extent. There’s some weird stuff in there if you go digging.
But if we really want to split hairs, let’s consider some things in the good old Bible that don’t exactly mesh with modern life. Leviticus 19:19 admonishes us not to plant more than one kind of seed in a given field, nor to wear any clothing made of blended material. The good book is silent on whether that applies before or after Labor Day.
What about that part in Deuteronomy 23:1 that bans men “wounded in the stones” from entering a church? Do testicular cancer survivors have to go hang out Denny’s until services are over? That seems something of a downer.
If it’s all to be taken literally, why hasn’t God sent bears to eat that guy at work who makes fun of my receding hairline? What a rip.
Maybe it’s the same reason none of the Muslims I know run around chanting “death to America” at every turn. You can’t do this stuff 100%. You do the best you can to be a good person. That might mean disregarding a few nitpicky technicalities for the sake of living a sane life within the broad parameters of your faith. In that respect, we’re not all that different.
And maybe we’re doing a better job of it than men like Mr. Keller.
3 thoughts on “This We Don’t Need”
The only thing more un-American than this kind of ludicrous ignorance and bigotry is dragging other people into it.
In a time when gun ownership is starting to stop being a social no-no, mugs like Keller make mugs like me look bad, see?
In the United States, we have a place for just about every idea and opinion out there, even for the ideas of tools like Keller.
So it is OK now to deny the protection of the second amendment to people who vote for people you do not agree with or who practice a different religion than one on your approved list?
Way to gut the Bill of Rights there Mr. Keller.
I’m as capable of prejudice as the next guy, but when it starts to cloud your vision to the point you make everyone in the subgroup the media lumps all gun owners in look like a bunch of racist jackasses, well, he deserves what I hope is coming to him.
It should be mentioned that Mr. Keller is not the first instructor to ban Obama voters from his classes. There were a couple of others who made the news for doing the same thing shortly after the 2008 election.
I don’t know what point they were trying to make, but it was the wrong way of making it. Fortunately, there were other instructors who didn’t see the need to politicize their classes, and they prospered. Even if Mr. Keller’s credentials remain intact, the market will vote with its feet.