There is a debate, or there was one until a 14-yer-old high school student proved a University of Illinois history professor wrong, as to whether or not signs that read, ‘Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply’ actually existed. Professor Richard Jensen authored a piece “ ‘No Irish Need Apply’: A Myth of Victimization,” for the Journal of Social History. His contention, roughly summarized, was that because he could only find one visual example of such a sign, it was all a myth…the product of the imagination of those in the Irish community.
Jensen was proven wrong by the 14-year-old Rebecca Fried, a ninth-grader at Sidwell Friends, who used Google to search newspaper archive databases and found dozens of work ads from U.S. newspapers in 1800s that included the phrase, ‘No Irish Need Apply.’
You can read more about it at Smithsonian Magazine, Irish Central and the Washington Post. It’s pretty fascinating, if for no other reason than it debunks the notion that a community’s claims of discrimination can be easily discounted by others who choose to dismiss their claims out of hand.
Can you think of another group that currently finds itself the victim of discrimination, but whose claims fall on deaf ears No? Let me give you some clues: Operation Choke Point; shadow bans; demonetization; and community guidelines.
The ‘myth of victimization’ is no myth in the case of the firearms community. Like the Irish, I assume, firearms owners and those in the industry don’t get to qualify as victims of disproportional mistreatment because nobody outside our community wants to think of it that way.
They are content to have credit card processors cut off service to companies that sell firearms related products online. They don’t object when YouTube once again changes their policies in an attempt to curtail firearms content on their platform after already demonetizing most, if not all gun content creators. These new rules are written in such a way that it’s highly likely most YouTube firearms content will be taken down and channels outright deleted.
And nobody seems to bat an eye when social media shadow bans a firearms related page, or worse. In the most inexplicable example NSSF’s Larry Keane wrote about Meta shutting down Vincent Hancock’s Facebook and Instagram after he won his fourth Olympic gold medal in Skeet.
And just the other day, our own Dan Zimmerman, editor of our sister news service Shooting News Weekly, found himself placed in Facebook jail for having the audacity to share a link to a Paul Markel gun review on the SAR9 SOCOM COMPACT 9mm Pistol published on SNW.
And it’s getting worse.
I once had a friend send me a link to a story about how actors in the porn industry were being unfairly targeted by financial institutions because of the unsavory nature of the work they do, which also fell under Operation Choke Point. When I replied, “Welcome to our world” and that this was exactly what the firearms industry was facing, I received a heated reply about always playing the victim.
And therein lies the problem. Firearms makers, gun owners, and gun content creators, among others, aren’t allowed to be victims, so anything done to target these groups in order to harm their business, restrict their rights, or silence their online voices, can be forgiven, ignored, or simply explained away with the proper amount of gaslighting.
When it comes to personal defense we always say that you are your own first responder. The same is true when it comes to being barred from exercising our rights within those communities others freely participate in. We are on our own.
We’re not welcomed and increasingly find ourselves looking in from the outside where government officials, bankers, legislators, social media companies and, yes, the mainstream media are comfortable leaving us behind. Because, well, we need not apply either.