As Florida Shooting Unfolded, NRA was Promoting 'Buy Your Loved One a Gun' Twitter Post
The National Rifle Association was promoting a Valentine's Day–themed tweet on Wednesday that urged its nearly 500,000 followers to "buy your loved one a gun" as a teenager in Florida was opening fire on his former high school classmates with an AR-15 assault rifle.
The NRA retweeted a post by Kimber Firearms that featured a photo of a heart-shaped pillow with matching handguns lying on it on Wednesday morning, according to the Internet archiving website the Wayback Machine. The gun advocacy organization's retweet was live at 3:49 p.m. EST. By 7 p.m. EST, the retweet had been deleted, Business Insider reported.
According to the timestamp, the post would have been deleted within hours of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The Broward County Sheriff's Office alerted the public via Twitter at 2:53 p.m. of the active shooter situation at the school. By 4:30 p.m., police had arrested the alleged gunman, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz. Cruz was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder early Thursday, according to the sheriff's office.
The NRA told Newsweek that the organization did not delete the tweet, Kimber Firearms did. The Kimber Firearms tweet appears to have been reposted from an Instagram account belonging to a gun shop out of Pensacola, Florida. That post, by the account Jims_Firearms_of_Florida, was originally published on February 2 and remains active.
http://www.newsweek.com/nra-gun-sales-florida-school-shooting-808128
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