Moderate views within gun advocacy groups are punished into conformity

Evidence

In some influential progun circles, a moderate view regarding gun rights is a punishable offense. A case in point is the uncompromising exercise of influence by the gun industry over gun journalism (Somaiya, 2014). In one of his columns in Guns & Ammo magazine, the distinguished gun journalist Dick Metcalf wrote that constitutional rights have limits: “[A]ll constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be” (Somaiya, 2014). Punishment came swiftly. Gun manufacturers threatened to withdraw financial backing for the magazine and for Metcalf’s TV program if he was not dismissed. He was promptly fired, but the magazine linked his firing to sponsors’ possible concern that customers would boycott their products. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1342

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral entrepreneurship and boundary-policing dynamic in Cooper’s social-conservatism argument and how ideological groups enforce orthodoxy.
• QUESTION: Is this conformity enforcement by economic threats generalizable to other ideological communities?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1342