Considering that shooting sports are some of the most participated in sports in the United States their "rule" makes little sense from a marketing stand point. I would not be surprised that the shooting sports have a much lower rates of injury or death for participants than football does. I would also guess that the injury or death rates among children that play football is dramatically higher than those who are involved in the shooting sports.
That's the classic red herring argument:
beside the point, misdirection [form of], changing the subject, false emphasis, the Chewbacca defense, irrelevant conclusion, irrelevant thesis, smokescreen, clouding the issue, ignorance of refutation, judgmental language [form of].
A
red herring is a blatant attempt to redirect the argument to another issue that to which the person doing the redirecting can better respond. While a
red herring is similar to the
avoiding the issue fallacy, the
red herring is a deliberate diversion of attention with the intention of trying to abandon the original argument.
The original argument, which Leo (and others) missed entirely, is whether or not the commercial violates the NFL's Advertising Policy, not whether shooting sports are safer than football (the commercial never even mentioned shooting sports) or whether the commercial talks about personal responsibility and family safety being one's own responsibility (which doesn't in any way violate the policy). At issue is whether or not the commercial violates the NFL's Advertising Policy by falling into any of the NFL's Prohibited Advertising Categories.
The commercial violates the NFL's Advertising Policy in two ways: {#5} It is advertising guns (and lamely, using emotional fear to do it), the fact that it doesn't actually mention guns is irrelevant, and {#12} because it is a politically motivated advertisement that falls under the category of Social Cause or Issue Advocacy. Those who are upset with the NFL's denial of the ad are upset because it fails to allow the word of their cause to spread.
