Connections

I’m going to lay out why I don’t believe that GunFreeDiningTennessee.org is the brainchild of Professor Ray Friedman.

For starters, let’s take a look at the website. It’s hosted by a Nashville company called The Horton Group. Horton also seems to have done the design work. If that company sounds familiar, it’s because they had practically the same website last year, GunsAndAlcoholDontMix.org. Take a look at the two sites. They’re practically identical. In fact, yesterday the GFD website’s twitter feed actually showed tweets from GandADM, though that’s no longer the case. Ned Horton is the owner of The Horton Group, whose FaceBook page show us that he likes “Protest Easy Guns”, “The Campaign to Close the Gun Show Loophole”, and (of course) “Liberadio.” He’s also an admin for the Facebook page for GunsAndAlcoholDontMix.org, and I vaguely recall him doing an interview last year for the page. So really this is one of his pet projects.

Next up: Will Cheek. In The Tennessean article about this new site today, he is pegged as Professor Ray’s attorney. The thing is, according to his bio page, he’s not that kind of lawyer. His specialty is representing restaurants that serve alcohol. And of course, don’t forget he also was one of the lawyers representing Randy Rayburn in the Restaurant Carry lawsuit. On a related note, The Horton Group counts Adam Dread (another lawyer in the Restaurant Carry lawsuit) as a client.

When you put this information together, you realize that there are only a couple of possible scenarios. Scenario #1 is that people who are against restaurant carry only know and interact with other people who are against restaurant carry, and that group is very, very small. If we were to assume that Professor Ray came up with this idea all by himself, then what are the odds that the hosting/design company he randomly chose would be the same company that put out a site with an identical message over a year ago? And then, what would the odds be that he happened to choose one of the lawyer’s that got last years law declared unconstitutionally vague?

Scenario #2 is that Professor Ray already knew all or some of these people, and approached them with an idea that was virtually identical to the one Ned Horton came up with last year. Ned completely forgot he had that idea and a functioning website and magicked up a new site.

Scenario #3 (and this is the one that I’m going for) is that Professor Ray already knew all or some of these people, and they approached him with the idea that he could use his teenage daughter and his position as a professor to try to paint this as something other than what it is: Randy Rayburn and his people trying to use deceptive tactics to get what they couldn’t get otherwise.

In other words, they have to lie to win.