The NRA opposes even voluntary, privately funded gun buyback programs.

Evidence

Todd Rathner, a Tucson, Arizona NRA national board member, threatened to sue the city for illegally destroying guns. The city attorney countered that the law applies to guns seized by police, not to guns turned in voluntarily by their owners. If the city did not comply, Rathner warned, he would get state lawmakers to pass a law to prohibit the practice. In a show of power, he asserted, “[W]e’ll pursue it either through litigation or legislation” (DaRonco, 2012). Gun promoters would not welcome images of long lines of people turning in their guns. This effort to suppress a voluntary benign activity that is privately funded appeared to be more concerned with image management than with gun preservation. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1238

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that opposition is about image rather than substance resonates with moral disengagement’s core theme of how image management substitutes for moral argument.