The Facebook page of the National Rifle Association disappeared this weekend in the wake of the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticuit; the page’s former location now redirects users back to the home page.
Press accounts speculate that the staunch anti-gun-control group deleted its page amid a growing and impassioned debate over whether gun laws need tightening. A woman answering phones at the NRA’s public affairs office declined to immediately comment on the Facebook page Monday. When asked whether the Facebook move was indeed voluntary, she responded, “I do not know, sir.” The association touted its 1.7 millionth Facebook “like” in a tweet midday Thursday, prompting an fusillade of angry replies the following day, after the school shooting. An early-morning Friday tweet about NRA giveaways prompted a similar backlash and the group has not tweeted since.
The NRA’s Google+ and YouTube pages remain intact, but the NRA “locked” its most recent Google+ post, decrying a surge in federal background checks, preventing the post from being shared with others or commented upon. On YouTube, the NRA appears to have similarly disabled comments on its most recent upload. So it would appear that the most famous Second Amendment advocacy group is not nearly as keen on people exercising the First Amendment.
