Grow up; the world isn’t all rainbows and unicorns.
Via The State:
Columbia Metropolitan Airport has removed a billboard-sized advertisement of a firearms manufacturer from its concourse.
The decision comes a day after The State newspaper reported the ad, featuring eight firearms from FN Manufacturing, upset some travelers. It touted, “Yeah, we carry.”
“I pulled in the commission, and really, they felt that given the negative feedback that it’d probably be better to bring it down,” said Dan Mann, executive director of the airport.
The Richland-Lexington Airport District approves all advertisements, including their text, content and graphics, according to the terms and conditions of their advertisement agreements.
Two other displays for FN will remain up: a different billboard and a promotional video at the escalators.
Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, who spotted the ad while at the airport Friday morning, said the banner with the multiple firearms wasn’t appropriate given its location.
“It was the wrong ad in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Benjamin said. “I could easily see why anyone, including gun owners, which I am, would be seriously alarmed.”
Benjamin stressed the city has a good relationship with FN Manufacturing, which has supplied Columbia Police Department’s firearms in the past. He said FN is a “good company.”
S.C. Poet Nikky Finney echoed Benjamin’s sentiment concerning the location in which the banner was displayed given “the tenor and the times we live in.”
“I’m trying to say that anything that goes up that looks like that and has that kind of attitude should be decided upon by a committee of people that understand that the young man that went to a church, pulled a trigger and took nine lives came from … Columbia,” said Finney, referencing the killing of nine worshipers at Emanuel AME in Charleston allegedly at the hands of Dylann Roof in June 2015.
Finney said it’s time for all segments of the nation to come together and talk about gun violence. It’s also time to find ways to make the nation a better place for young black people and police officers, she said.
FN’s ad, which was more obscene than insensitive, doesn’t allow that type of conversation to happen, Finney said. She was disappointed the other two ads didn’t come down as well.
An airport staffer previously said FN’s intended audience was Fort Jackson soldiers. Nearly 20 percent of the airport’s travelers are military personnel. FN and airport officials have declined to provide details as to when the ad campaign started.