Super Bowl of Hypocrisy: NFL Ad Policy Stiff Arms Daniel Defense

Here at the NRA, we love football.  This is America, after all.

But, let's face it.  There aren't too many sports more violent than one in which men weighing well upwards of 300 pounds repeatedly and deliberately crash into one another at speeds that most avid runners can only dream about, and slam each other to the ground.  Football is a physical sport.

And there's no attempt to downplay the violent nature of the sport.  After all, the team with the ball is called "the offense," a long pass downfield is referred to as a "bomb," and players who get too aggressive are penalized for "unnecessary roughness."

So, we're a little confused by a National Football League policy against accepting TV advertisements featuring "firearms, ammunition or other weapons."

The subject came up recently, after Fox TV had to inform Daniel Defense, the well-known manufacturer of high-quality AR-15 firearms and related products, that NFL policy prevented it from accepting the gun maker's ad for the 2014 Super Bowl.

Notably, the ad, which can be seen here, doesn't even show a "firearm, ammunition or other weapons," but instead only advocates the right of a person to make his own decisions about how to defend his family.

What's next?  Will today's NFL bureaucrats try to kick the late, great, former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Bob Hayes out of the NFL Hall of Fame, because his nickname was "Bullet Bob?"

Apparently, Daniel Defense's ad was initially rejected because it ends with DD's logo, which shows an image of an AR-15.  But even after DD volunteered to replace the logo with an image of the American flag, the NFL wouldn't budge.

The NFL's denial of DD's ad is blatantly hypocritical.  As Michelle Malkin noted in a National Review piece this week, the NFL is free to accept or reject any advertiser it wants to, but its "prohibited content" list didn't stop them from allowing lucrative vulgar ads over the years that, according to Malkin's article, have featured:

• an upside-down clown who appears to pour Bud Light beer up his rear end;

• a bizarre sex-change-operation analogy to tout Holiday Inn's hotel upgrades;

• a barefoot Kenyan runner violently dragged to the ground by white hunters and forced to wear a pair of    Just For Feet running shoes;

• a flatulent Budweiser horse whose emissions cause a candle to torch a woman's hair;

• ad characters getting electrocuted, run over by buses, kicked, punched, tackled, thrown out of high-rise buildings, and attacked by crotch-biting dogs.

And, as Malkin notes, the NFL has routinely run ads that degrade women in a variety of ways, and regularly airs trailers for violent Hollywood movies and video games. As examples, Malkin points out that the in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting, a commercial promoting the shoot-'em-up flick Gangster Squad aired during a Colts-Texans game, and a spot promoting the M-rated video game Hitman: Absolution aired during a postgame show.

And let's not forget last year's Sunday Night Football rant by blowhard Bob Costas, who blindsided unsuspecting viewers with a personal "op-ed" blaming the tragic murder-suicide committed by Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher on America's "gun culture."   Or the anti-gun ads purchased by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "Mayors Against Illegal Guns" that ran during past Super Bowls.

Gun control supporters--some of whom probably consider badminton too violent--will pretend to be instant football fans over the NFL's latest ad ban, and defend the NFL's rejection of the ad as "a commonsense goal line stand."

We'd say instead that it is more like a fumble.