MLB Star Excoriates Reporters After Getting Hounded over Pro-Gun Post
If you’re an NFL player and want to protest the national anthem, the media will literally make up a constitutional right you don’t have so that you can continue to act as you please in your place of work.
If you’re an athlete and try exercising your actual constitutional rights, however, expect a bit more pushback.
That’s what J.D. Martinez found out earlier this week. People discovered a 5-year-old post he made in support of the Second Amendment and all of a sudden, all hell broke loose.
The Instagram post involved a gun control quote attributed to Adolf Hitler (as the Daily Wire notes, he said something like it, and far worse than it, but the exact quote is a bit specious) along with the comment “This is why I always stay strapped! #thetruth.”
So, of course, the media lost its collective minds over it. Martinez, to his credit, refused to apologize, noting his family fled Cuba under the Castro regime and knows the importance of the Second Amendment
“As most of you guys know I’m Cuban-American, and most of my family was run out of Cuba because of a brutal dictator,” Martinez said Tuesday surrounded by a group of reporters, according to the New York Daily News.
“It’s terrible. It’s one of those things where I’ll never get to meet some of my family because of it.”
“I love my country. I stand by the Constitution and I stand by the Second Amendment,” he added.
“It’s something I take pride in and it’s something I’ll back up.”
“Everybody has a right to stand by what they believe in and that’s what makes us American,” he continued. “We’re not all going to believe in the same things, but that’s what makes this country so great.”
He also took a shot at the media.
“I don’t want this distraction,” he said, according to USA Today. “You guys are talking about something that happened six years ago. I posted it and that’s why I’m out here talking about it, but I’m worried about a championship.”
Indeed, Martinez is in the running for the triple crown, leading the American League in batting average and RBI and second in home runs. The Red Sox have also established themselves as the team to beat.
As for those who might protest the use of Hitler — quite a strong image indeed — that’s a fair point, especially since history’s worst dictator didn’t use that exact quote.
What he used instead, however, is even more damning.
“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjugated races to possess arms,” Hitler said. “History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjugated races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”
That seems to qualify. Or perhaps you could take a look at gun laws in Cuba.
Either way, in a country where a contrived First Amendment right to do whatever you want at your job when the national anthem is playing and not face consequences is used to defend NFL players, one might find it just slightly curious that the Second Amendment — which implies an actual right, not an invented one — is getting blowback from reporters.
J.D. Martinez called them out on it, and good for him.
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