NRA-ILA: This is What Keeps America Free

U.S.A. -(AmmoLand.com)- In response to a public expression of lawful political speech, “safety officers” come to the person’s home at midnight to interrogate him. He is accused of intimidation, making threats, hate crimes, and disorderly conduct. He is found guilty and his punishment includes exclusion from the community, suspension of his academic privileges, a ban on taking leadership roles in campus organizations, mandatory meetings with appropriate officials to learn about correct ways of thinking and speaking, and the presentation of a formal written apology, to be submitted in draft form “for approval.”

Readers would be excused for assuming that this occurred in some backward, repressive dictatorship or totalitarian regime, but these troubling events took place at an American University.

Austin Tong, a senior at Fordham University in New York State, posted two messages on his Instagram account. The first, on June 3, was a comment about the “nonchalant societal reaction” to the killing of David Dorn, a black, retired St. Louis Police officer. His second post, a day later, was a photo of himself holding his lawfully owned AR-15 rifle at his off-campus home. This was captioned, “Don’t tread on me,” followed by the emojis of the American and Communist Chinese flags and a hashtag “commonly used by Chinese citizens to avoid censorship of online discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre.”