In the week following the May 24 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Sioux City Bandits, a professional indoor football team from western Iowa, had planned a giveaway of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle as a “Military Night” promotion, as they had done a year earlier. After widespread criticism, the Sioux City Journal reported that the team’s Missouri-based owner, J.R. Bond, said canceling or postponing the giveaway “didn’t even approach my radar screen.” Bond added that “some people’s ‘obsession with a piece of metal is overblown’ and that the negative comments came from East Coast residents who are ‘driving electric cars and eating wheat grass.’”

For the record: One of the main critics was the local co-owner of the State Steel Supply Company in Sioux City, who said he would end his sponsorship of the Bandits because “this promotion is beyond tone deaf and is incredibly insensitive to current affairs.” (Also, for the record: You can buy both wheat grass and electric cars in Sioux City.)

J.R. Bond was right about one thing — that some people’s “obsession with a piece of metal is overblown.” In fact, if lots of people did not have overblown obsessions with guns, he wouldn’t have been using one as a promotion, and his team would likely be named something other than “the Bandits.”