Posted on 10/22/2010 5:58:35 AM PDT by marktwain
The city of Phoenix, in an apparently arbitrary move and without formal legal process, has forced CBS Outdoors to tear down 50 illuminated bus-shelter billboards under contract to promote gun safety training for children and their parents.
The posters were placed by TrainMeAZ.com, a commercial joint-educational effort of the firearms industry in Arizona, and had been up all over the Phoenix metro area for a little over one week before the city acted.
“The Phoenix attorney’s office claimed these were public service announcements, and those are banned,” said Alan Korwin, manager of the TrainMeAZ campaign and the Publisher at Bloomfield Press, a sponsor of the program. “It’s a bogus excuse — and they know full well we’re an LLC and not a non-profit. The commercial sponsors, shooting ranges and trainers on the website expect to attract customers. The ads are aimed at parents, so they can teach gun safety and the values of marksmanship to their kids,” he said. “We’re promoting a culture of marksmanship, where everyone learns to shoot and understands gun safety.”
Assistant Phoenix city attorney Ted Mariscal claimed in a conference call with Mr. Korwin and CBS Outdoor that the billboards weren’t commercial enough, the message was too vague, and then demanded the message be changed to his satisfaction. When pressed for a definition of what is either sufficiently commercial or what defines a public service ad he declined to respond, referring instead to a 12-year-old 9th Circuit court case concerning a religious group (Children of the Rosary) and abortion ads. CBS is designing new art to please the city, but without guidelines of what’s acceptable, there’s no way to predict the result, and the TrainMeAZ campaign isn’t exactly keen on this approach.
Mariscal offered to provide the case he says matters, and the lease agreement he says allows the city to remove the ads. The case is now under review. No lease agreement has been provided, and the city apparently has no definitions in place, apparently leaving Mr. Mariscal to act on his own unfettered accord. Nothing in the city’s advertising guidelines, provided by Mr. Mariscal, appear to justify the censored ads.
In the meanwhile, TrainMeAZ is losing more than 800,000 impressions per day it had been receiving through this Phase One of the campaign. A bulletin billboard with a similar message and goal remains up on Interstate 17, through another company. It gets about 135,000 eyes driving by daily (facing southbound traffic near Peoria exit). Several outdoor advertisers have contacted TrainMeAZ in an effort to pick up the lost business for themselves. CBS has offered a slate of city billboards to replace the messages the city has banned.
“Mariscal has offered to approve some other advertisements to replace the ones we designed at great expense and want,” Korwin said. “We’ll be reasonable and look, but we don’t exactly want the city of Phoenix writing our advertisements for us. If anything is absolutely an affront to free speech and the First Amendment, there it is on a platter. Who do these people think they are?”
Government should stay out of the way of businesses trying to make it in these tough economic times, or in any times. Instead, government has become one of the biggest obstacles we face, Korwin noted. It’s bad enough Phoenix has attacked our free speech, but now they’re messing with our Second Amendment rights, and right before an election too. People who support this ought to be removed from office and punished for such malfeasance.
Legislators aware of the problem have expressed outrage at the censorship effort by the city, and are preparing a plan of action. More news will follow soon.
The program is an outgrowth of the Constitutional Carry law, effective in July this year, that frees all law abiding adults in Arizona to discreetly carry firearms. With the audience expanding from 2% of the public willing to apply and pay for a government permission slip to carry, to 50% of the public that possesses firearms, private industry figured this 25-fold increase in potential market was worth attracting.
Mr. Korwin will be at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show this weekend at the University of Phoenix stadium in Glendale, where he will autograph books and answer questions.
Unless PUBLIC FUNDS are used to pay for it, it is NOT a "Public Service Announcement".
Yeah, but they will allow billboards showing how to put condoms on cucumbers and where to get abortions.
So, the left keeps saying that to prevent AIDS & drug abuse, the answer is education, education, education. Yet, when it comes to guns, silence it the answer?
I gave those traitors my two cents worth back in 2001 ... we were preparing to launch attacks against the Taliban and were working with the Uzbeks to set up air bases. The Uzbeks were the only country in the region that was supporting us at the time.
NPR chose that moment to do a massive hit piece on how brutal the Uzbek regime was and how we should not be dealing with them ... the one country that was supporting us. F%$K NPR and all the dickwads that work there. Traitors one and all.
So then, the Phoenix attorney’s office doesn’t want safety for kids?!
I suppose it’s populated with ex-hippies spouting dull canards like, “Guns should never be near children or any living thing.”
They may change their thinking when an illegal alien drug cartel member that is tired of occupying US soil in one of our parks comes out of the park to have some Gatorade out of their refrigerator and then go on to slake his other thirst with their wife and daughter....
Exactly!
of course the socialist don’t want a “trained” and “armed” public - having a single weapon in the house makes their job of re-making the US in their image much harder -
Back in the day, it was always one’s grandfather that took the young boy out to learn to shoot and kill their first deer/rabbit/wild gooose/etc...
But kids today learn hand-eye coordination through X-Box where consequences are just a click away to reset and start over - there’s no “real” experiences.
Yeah - we need to train GUN SAFETY - and yes - we still need to maintain arms in out houses! As a former law enforcement officer - it’s not the LEGAL & Licensed owners I would worry about - it’s the ones that took steps to hide it - or those that wanted to blanket society with anti-gun laws...
Phoenix seems to be going the way of Berkeley, Madison and Austin.
“the city apparently has no definitions in place, apparently leaving Mr. Mariscal to act on his own unfettered accord.”
If true, Phoenix has created a classic example of “arbitrary and capricious” job description.
ANd, that means a feeding frenzy of lawyers feasting on the Phoenix taxpayers assets. They deserve what happens for electing such arrogant Liberals.
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