The tech forums have always been pretty good resources, and even in GD there are plenty of people I admire, including most of the old hands. swingset, subnet, DK-Prof, Aimless, Miami JBT, and Zhukov to name a few. But it ain't all sunshine and rainbows, and reading GD in the past 2 months wouldn't give anybody a very good impression of "firearm enthusiasts".
Credit where it's due: unlike, say, TheDonald or even r/conservative, it is a free speech zone. I don't recall them banning anybody for expressing a political opinion. If you were left-leaning you would definitely get dogpiled by commenters calling you an idiot or a shill, so you probably wouldn't hang around very long, but that's just what happens when the community is 95+% right wing, and maybe 50+% what you might call far right wing. You would not be censored just for going against the herd.
It's been moderated much more strictly in recent days, including moving most political discussion to a separate, paid-members-only board, but it still takes like 10 clicks around GD to find a post where somebody suggests it might've been good if some Democrats in congress died that day. Subtle and not-so-subtle race replacement conspiracy theory rears its ugly head now and then in GD too. If you're GoDaddy, looking at what happened and what type of rhetoric led to it, I can see why you'd want to distance yourself ASAP. It's not the call I would've made if I ran a DNS registrar, but I'm not going to pretend there's nothing there to justify it.
You never had to look very far on AR15.com's General Discussion board to find people posting what they'd like to do to Pelosi/Schumer/AOC, or more recently, saying that if the election result isn't overturned legally "it's up to us to do something about it". I distinctly remember after SCOTUS refused to hear the Texas v. PA case, posters saying they wouldn't mind if some justices were assassinated.
The site's code of conduct prohibited making threats, but very thinly veiled ones went mostly unmoderated. Including the practice of simply using CoC (code of conduct) as a euphemism, such as "Somebody needs to CoC that bitch (angry red grrrrr emote)".
The site cracked down MUCH harder on that stuff right after Twitter banned Trump and Parler went down. They moved politics to a separate, paid-members-only board and closed most of the political threads in GD. But apparently it wasn't enough and GoDaddy doesn't want to be associated with it.
I don't believe AR15.com ever made any official posts that advocated for violence in any way. It was all user content.
Credit where it's due: unlike, say, TheDonald or even r/conservative, it is a free speech zone. I don't recall them banning anybody for expressing a political opinion. If you were left-leaning you would definitely get dogpiled by commenters calling you an idiot or a shill, so you probably wouldn't hang around very long, but that's just what happens when the community is 95+% right wing, and maybe 50+% what you might call far right wing. You would not be censored just for going against the herd.
It's been moderated much more strictly in recent days, including moving most political discussion to a separate, paid-members-only board, but it still takes like 10 clicks around GD to find a post where somebody suggests it might've been good if some Democrats in congress died that day. Subtle and not-so-subtle race replacement conspiracy theory rears its ugly head now and then in GD too. If you're GoDaddy, looking at what happened and what type of rhetoric led to it, I can see why you'd want to distance yourself ASAP. It's not the call I would've made if I ran a DNS registrar, but I'm not going to pretend there's nothing there to justify it.