Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary gives two definitions for “decoy,” the first being “a wooden or plastic bird (such as a duck) that is used by hunters to attract live birds,” and the second, more relevant to the discussion being offered here, is “a person or thing that attracts people’s attention so they will not notice someone or something else.” In either case, it involves a premeditated deception to accomplish an agenda that ends up victimizing whatever, or whomever, is lured into falling for—no offense to you hunters—a fraud.
What hunters should be offended by is an attempt to trick them into supporting “progressive” political goals, inevitably hostile to the right to keep and bear arms, by adopting the guise of being “sportsmen’s groups.” Responding to that, the Environmental Policy Alliance is out to expose what it calls “Green Decoys.”
“Funded by liberal foundations, these groups use sportsmen to camouflage their extreme anti-gun and anti-energy agenda,” the ironically (cleverly)-named EPA warns. “For example, the Joyce Foundation, major funders of the Izaak Walton League of America and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, has given millions to anti-Second Amendment groups like the Violence Policy Center.
“They have also given 6-figure grants to support Mayors Against Illegal Guns, anti-gun ‘messaging research,’ and efforts to increase regulation on firearm ownership,” the EPA advisory continues. “They even tried to make gun violence prevention a primary focus of the American Medical Association.”
To establish their case, EPA has produced a “Green Decoys” video (posted on the YouTube video-sharing website under that title, and also on the group’s website, GreenDecoys.com), and a report on financial backers, “How Radical Environmentalists are Using ‘Sportsmen’s’ Groups as Camouflage.” In it, they flesh out their claims about the recipient groups and the donors behind them, including background information like how the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation included Barack Obama on its board before he became president.
Employing a “divide and conquer” strategy against gun owners, often pitting sport shooters against those who own firearms for the primary purposes of protection and freedom, is hardly new. It’s been tried before with other well-funded shill groups established by those who can’t push citizen disarmament edicts through if they’re up front about their intentions, so they instead package them in a way to induce well-meaning but poorly informed gun owners to take the bait.
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