NFL Refuses to Run Daniel Defense Super Bowl TV Commercial

The NFL has refused to run a self-protection-themed TV commercial from Daniel Defense during the 2014 Super Bowl game. Apparently it’s fine to display half-naked ladies, or sell alcohol products on national television, but anything related to the Second Amendment is off-limits. In refusing to air the Daniel Defense commercial, the NFL cited its League policy against promoting firearms. According to the NSSF, “It is league regulation and not federal law that prohibits the advertising of firearms or ammunition on NFL broadcasts.”

Watch Daniel Defense Commercial Banned from the Super Bowl by the NFL

If you watch the minute-long video above, you will see that it is pretty tame. It is all about a man taking individual responsibility for protecting his family. You won’t see guns being fired, in fact you won’t see any actual guns at all*. The message is subtle — if you care about your family’s security, you may wish to exercise your Constitutional right to own a firearm. That doesn’t seem extreme at all, but NFL decision-makers decided that this commercial was too controversial, and violated its ‘no guns’ rules.

Larry Keane, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, criticized the action of the NFL: “It would have been interesting to see if the television ad that Daniel Defense wanted to run during the 2014 Super Bowl would have caused the hubbub in elite liberal circles that the National Football League clearly feared it would. It may well have, but we’ll never know, for sure, since the NFL decided that its ‘no firearms’ on its airtime ruling would stand after the video review.

While we are disappointed that the nicely-produced Daniel Defense commercial will not run on national television during the Super Bowl, we are very pleased to see the attention being paid to the decision of a major sport’s management that seems so out of touch with the pro-Second Amendment sentiments of so many football fans across the country. Conservative commentators have been busy scoring points. Nationally-syndicated Columnist Michelle Malkin, for example, wrote ‘The National Football League’s hypocrisy and selective decency standards reek like a post-game locker room’.” Here is a Fox News commentary about the NFL’s refusal to air the Daniel Defense commercial:

* The video does show the Daniel Defense logo with the silhouette of a rifle. Daniel Defense agreed to remove that rifle graphic, but the NFL still said “no”. As a Fox commentator explains: “This is really not about guns at all but [rather] the idea of guns, and how distasteful they are… to people in the media.”