The NRA Has Some Pretty Weird Ideas About What Cars Are In 'Bad Neighborhoods'

America's National Rifle Association has been getting a lot of attention thanks to strange and divisive recent promotional video that's been generating a lot of controversy. After watching the video, I saw another similar one, where I was struck by one notable detail: the NRA seems to have no idea what kind of cars are in "bad neighborhoods."

I say this because of one scene in the video that I believe is supposed to depict a dangerous, run-down inner-city neighborhood. It's got narrow, dirty streets, run-down row housing with barred or boarded-up windows, an open fire hydrant spraying wildly.

Yet right there on the street, with paint peeling and oil leaking... sits a Studebaker Avanti.

Well, actually, it's an Avanti II, with the square bezels around the headlights. Catch it about 24 seconds into the video above.

Is it a poor oversimplification of urban blight with fear-mongering overtones, or... something worse than that? If that's the sort of car that's littering the streets of that shithole, that's got to be the scariest neigborhood I've ever wanted to visit.

Though, if I did, I bet I'd be cornered by a gang of youths in a Triumph Stag who would hold me down until I agreed to help them refill the dampers in the dashpots of their SU carbs, and then they'd drag me to an ATM, where I'd be forced, at sharpened dipstick-point, to withdraw money so they could finally buy that original 1960s in-spare-wheel Hazet tool kit they saw on The Samba for their communal Porsche 356 project car.

A chilling vision of America indeed.