I decided that since Google had gone public maybe they would be less openly bigoted against gun owners.  I wasn’t interested in advertising with them but I thought perhaps I would feel comfortable with them paying me money to advertise on one or more of my web sites.  Boomershoot.org gets, by far, the most traffic so I applied with that site.  I got the following rejection.  Boomershoot.org apparently violates one or more of their policies (see the links below).  When I first got the rejection below I looked at the policy and it included pyrotechnics and explosives.  It no longer does.  Now the only infringement I might be violating is this one:

Sales or promotion of certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles

Which, technically, boomershoot.org is not doing.  It promotes the use of firearms and ammunition.  But I’m not sure they see things my way.  I thought about my rejection for quite a while and considered organizing a boycott against Google (sort of like boycotting Microsoft, very tough to do).  I have helped with that sort of thing before and we were successful.  I did a quick search and found lots of other people already with the same idea for various reasons and decided it wasn’t very feasible.

So I decided I would expose them for being bigots against free speech as well as firearms.  When I got around to posting a bunch of progun blog entries on my blog I sent them a message asking about putting AdSense on my blog.  To my surprise they agreed.

So now what do I do?  I had fully expected they would turn me down and I could publicly complain about them not even wanting people to talk about guns in a favorable manner.  I can’t do that but I’m not entirely sure I want to help them get advertising dollars either.  I could turn them down and complain to them about their policy, but that is kind of silly because I certainly knew about their policy when I requested they consider my blog.

Comments and suggests are welcome.

—–Original Message—–
From: Google AdSense [mailto:adsense-support@google.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 2:05 PM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Cc: Google AdSense
Subject: Google AdSense Account Status

Hello Joe,

Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense. After reviewing your
application, our program specialists have found that it does not comply
with our policies. Therefore, we’re unable to accept you into Google
AdSense at this time.

We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below. If
you are able to resolve these issues, please feel free to reply to this
email for reconsideration when you have made the changes.

Issues:

  – Unacceptable site content

———————

Further detail:

Unacceptable site content: Your website contains content that we do not
allow at this time. Please review our policies
(https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) for a complete list of site
content not allowed on web pages.

———————

For a complete list of AdSense criteria, please visit:
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US
https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms?hl=en_US

If you would like to submit another website for consideration, simply
reply to this email and provide us with the URL. If this new website
complies with our program policies, we will help you start delivering
Google ads in minutes.

Please contact us at adsense-support@google.com if you have any
questions.

Regards,

The Google Team

The National Academies just today announced Data on Firearms and Violence Too Weak to Settle Policy Debates.

The group that produced this work was composed of: The National Institute of Justice, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Joyce Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Except for the National Institute of Justice and the Annie E. Casey Foundation the other organizations have a long distinguished history of being very anti-gun. I had never heard of the the Annie E. Casey Foundation so I did a little research and found these pages on their web site indicating they are at least midly anti-gun:

http://www.aecf.org/tarc/resource/show.php?object=example&id=241&topic_id=20
http://www.aecf.org/kidscount/indicator_briefs/teen_death.pdf

Yet when these organizations looked closely they had to conclude:

current research and data on firearms and violent crime are too weak to support strong conclusions about the effects of various measures to prevent and control gun violence

Of course this doesn’t say “More Guns, Less Crime“.  It merely says, “We don’t know what the effect of gun availability is on crime.“ 

If anyone, unless they are a top notch research scientist with unpublished work on this subject, continues to advocate gun control as a solution to reducing violent crime prior to new research coming out they are not only bigots, they are arrogant bigots. 

And the bigot posting comments under the name of MAD here and here has clearly established his or her position near the top of the list of arrogant bigots.

Read all the details here. 

San Francisco supervisors want voters to approve a sweeping handgun ban that would prohibit almost everyone except law enforcement officers, security guards and military members from possessing firearms in the city.

The measure, which will appear on the municipal ballot next year, would bar residents from keeping guns in their homes or businesses, Bill Barnes, an aide to Supervisor Chris Daly, said Wednesday. It would also prohibit the sale, manufacturing and distribution of handguns and ammunition in San Francisco, as well as the transfer of gun licenses.

…

Under the language of the measure, the ban would not apply police officers, security guards, members of the military, and anyone else “actually employed and engaged in protecting and preserving property or life within the scope of his or her employment.”

If approved by a majority of the city’s voters, the law would take effect in January 2006. Residents would have 90 days after that to relinquish their handguns.

One of the more interesting aspects of this is that the ban would be illegal because of state prememption on firearms laws so it couldn’t really be enforced.  Another potentially illegal aspect–it’s possible there is some sort of compensation scheme in mind which isn’t mentioned in the news articles but if there isn’t I also suspect there is a problem with taking of property without renumeration.  And of course there is that pesky 2nd Amendment issue.  But California hasn’t been bothered by it for as long as anyone can remember.  And politicians, and liberals in particular, generally don’t really care if what they want to do is illegal so I doubt that any of those things will slow them down any in their lemming like rush for the ocean (an urban legend by the way).  As pointed out in the article:

Washington, D.C., is the only major American city that currently bans handgun possession by private citizens. Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association, said San Francisco would be remiss to use that city as a model.

“If gun control worked, Washington, D.C., would be the beacon. However, it’s the murder capital of the United States,” he said.

Technically D.C. is the only major American city that bans handguns, but IIRC Chicago only allows handguns if they have been registered and “grandfathered” since 1976.  So in essence handguns are banned in Chicago as well.  The end result is that D.C. and Chicago tend to alternate in terms of which city is “the murder capital of the United States”.  One must presume that San Francisco wants to join in the competition.

Update 19:30 12/16/2004: The Second Amendment Foundation came out with this press release.