In an uncomfortably combustible combination, it is the team and it is the timing driving this latest controversy in sports.
This is the Dallas Cowboys. The club’s last heydays in the early-mid ‘90s are now older than some of its current players. “America’s Team” has become a faint, stale perfume, an almost mocking appellation. Yet this is a franchise, led by an owner who never met a sponsor dollar he didn’t like, that memories still hold up as one of the biggest brands in all of sports.
And this is the team that chose now to announce its new sponsorship with the gun-themed Black Rifle Coffee Company.
The team located in the same state as Uvalde, where six weeks earlier a mass killer with an assault weapon slaughtered 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers.
The team that chose to celebrate its new partnership one day after another coward with an assault rifle perched on a rooftop and sprayed death across a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, murdering seven innocents and wounding 54 others.
Two of the murdered were a young couple who leave behind a 2-year-old.
“#CowboysNation, please welcome America’s Coffee to America’s Team,” tweeted the Cowboys.
The predominant response across social media has not been especially welcoming, as one might imagine.
The tone deafness of the Cowboys’ partnership and when it was announced was roughly in league with Darren Bailey, a far-right Republican running for governor of Illinois, advising people to “move on” from the Highland Park massacre. This he said two hours after the carnage. Before the killer had even been caught.
Move on.
Don’t do anything about this national shame. No. Just move on. Until the next massacre. Then move on again. Until the next one after that.
A couple of things are true about the Salt Lake City-based Black Rifle Coffee Company.
And don’t get this wrong: This company has broken no laws. Heck, the coffee might even be great!
One: It was founded by a former Green Beret, Evan Hafer, and the company hires and otherwise supports veterans and first responders. That’s the good part.
Two: Hafer donates to very conservative causes including one called the America Reloaded PAC, according to the Federal Elections Commission database. He called his company “pro-Second Amendment” in a 2021 New York Times story. Which probably was obvious based on BRCC’s coffee blend names like AK-47 Espresso and Silencer Smooth and Murdered Out.
Two, part two: Black Rifle Coffee Company has been adopted by many in the far right, its company apparel seen worn by Kyle Rittenhouse and by some insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6. It is not unreasonable to say this company is, and rather proudly is, interwoven in the pervasiveness of American gun culture. Leaning into it.
It also may be worth noting there are plenty of veteran-owned coffee companies in America that do not glorify and legitimize assault rifles by having a coffee named after them at a time when that is the weapon of choice for mass murder, the new and metastasizing American plague.
America’s obsession with gun culture encourages and enables the worst among us. And that obsession is its most outrageous when it finds logical that owning a military-grade weapon capable of mass destruction is somehow an inalienable right that founders of the Constitution had in mind or could have envisioned in a time of muskets and bows and arrows.
Saw a T-shirt offered online that reads, “If Guns Kills People, I Guess that Means Spoons Make You Fat.”
Might be a good item for the BRCC merch store. Of course the logic of the T-shirt slogan breaks down somewhat until which time people begin committing mass killings with spoons.
How about this: We protect the Second Amendment to include small-arms home protection and your hunting rifle, but we amend it to eliminate the assault weapons favored in mass shootings? No? Too logical?
Otherwise let’s just go with a Supreme Court very concerned about protecting the unborn but much less so in protecting the children murdered in their own school and the parade goers on the Fourth of July God Bless America.
Otherwise let’s just move on, like the man said.
Let’s don’t do anything about this national shame. No. Just move on. Until the next massacre. Then move on again. Until the next one after that.
