Outside the Wire by Jason Kander

Author:Jason Kander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

LESSON NUMBER FIVE

Keep it real.

You probably wouldn’t have bought this book if you hadn’t at least heard of me, and you might think you know me from a television appearance, or from Let America Vote, or from my podcast, or even just as a guy you follow on social media, but that’s not how you first learned of me.

I first showed up on your radar because of a campaign ad in which I assembled a rifle, blindfolded, while making the case for gun control, and the best way for me to illustrate my point about the danger of playing political pretend is to tell you the story behind that ad.

I have an F rating from the NRA.* In fact, the NRA hates me so much that when I ran for the Senate, Wayne LaPierre, the president of the NRA, came to Missouri himself to personally campaign against me—while they were running millions of dollars in attack ads.

To call Missouri a pro-gun state would be an understatement. In Missouri, a nineteen-year-old man can carry a gun nearly anywhere he wants without ever having to get a permit of any kind. In fact, if he bought it at a gun show, he doesn’t even have to fill out the paperwork for a background check.

If he feels threatened by an unarmed person, he can shoot them dead and never spend a day in jail.

So when millionaire Lapierre’s jet touched down in my state, my supporters got worried. All of a sudden everyone was calling the campaign, trying to convince me to do one of those ads where I shoot a really big gun, talk about how much I love hunting, and basically pretend to be a Republican.

I haven’t been hunting since I was a kid, and, frankly, I didn’t get into politics to play a character on TV, so I never considered going that direction. Instead, as a proud progressive running for Senate in a red state, I knew the best strategy would just be to keep it real.

“I bet I can put a rifle together a lot faster than the other guy,” I said to my team, prompting them to ask if I could do it blindfolded. Since I had cleaned my weapon in the woods in the middle of the night so many times in the army, I told them I probably could. A few days later, Diana used her iPhone to film me as I sat on the living room floor, closed my eyes, and assembled a rifle I’d borrowed from my dad.

I texted the video to Abe and he shared it with the team who, apparently, lost their minds with excitement.

The resulting ad was me saying I was right about background checks, the NRA was wrong, and I knew what the heck I was talking about. Most people agreed with me, and even if they didn’t, they knew I was going to stand up for what I believed in, even if it meant going head-to-head with the NRA.

And while

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