Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake. So please, gun control advocates, feel free to rename yourselves. Yet again. Although I have to say I’ll miss “gun safety advocate.” Because armed Americans can’t hear the words “gun safety” enough.
As for the term’s failed replacement — “gun reform advocate” — I liked that one, too, because it was totally stupid. Believe it or not, the latest moniker is even stupiderer.
GVP advocate. The acronym stands for Gun Violence Prevention.
Our old friend Mike “the Gun Kapo” Weisser “invented” the term ostensibly to compete with his three-letter bogeyman (the NRA). The first GVP use that caught my attention: Gun Violence Prevention Advocates Need to Unite and Organize for November.
Does it bother me that the increasingly shrill appeals for money by the NRA contain statements that simply aren’t true? Not really. After all, when you’re selling something that people don’t need, you do what you gotta do. What does bother me is the degree to which NRA emails and messaging aren’t matched by the other side.
And you would think that since the Gun Violence Prevention movement (or what we call ‘GVP’) finally has someone running for president who is talking loudly and continuously about the need to end gun violence, this would be enough of a reason to ramp things up and start responding to the NRA in kind. But I received no less than four emails today from national and state-level GVP groups and none of them mentioned the election at all.
I dismissed Mr. Weisser’s “what we call ‘GVP'” statement as arrogant wishful thinking (hardly a first). And GVP disappeared without a trace. Until today, when The Trace trotted-out GVP — without explanation — for a news item.
2. GVP advocates get disinvited from a suicide prevention walk
Organizers of a San Diego suicide prevention charity walk asked a delegation from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America [San Diego chapter below] to not distribute literature at the event this past Saturday, citing differences over gun policy.
“Their organization’s legislative stance related to guns is inconsistent with our efforts,” Jessica van der Stad, the regional director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, told the Voice of San Diego. “As a suicide prevention organization, we are not in the business of saying who can and cannot own firearms. We are in the business of saving lives.”
In a weird way, I hope “GVP” catches on.
While the military and government love them some acronyms, here in the real world, branding gurus consider letter-only names anathema. Sure, the NRA, CBS and even IBM are a thing. But it takes for-ever to establish widespread recognition of a letter-only name, and there’s no guarantee of success.
Going three-letter requires singular focus. The Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex is split between the Moms, Bradys, Everytowns, the VPC (who no one’s heard of) and ARS (who . . . wait for it . . . just changed their name).
Any mainstream media attempt to lump these gun control groups under the GVP banner will dilute the individual gun ban brands.
Not to mention the fact that Mike and his minions aren’t the first to lay claim to “GVP.” The EU (European Union) spends millions of Euros promoting GVP (“Good Pharmacovigilance“). The American Stock Exchange lists power company software behemoth GSE Systems as GVP. Grand Valley Power (above) owns the url gvp.org. Oh, and wikipedia.org offers the following citations for GVP.
- Global Volcanism Program, a program of the Smithsonian Institution to document Earth’s volcanoes and their eruptive history over the past 10,000 years
- Great Valley Products, a former third-party Amiga hardware supplier
- All-German People’s Party (German: Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei), a political party in the Federal Republic of Germany 1952–1957
- Gurukula Vidya Peeth, an Indian high school in Ibrahim Patan, Rangareddy, Andhra Pradesh, India
- G. V. Prakash Kumar (born 1987), Indian film score and soundtrack composer mainly for Tamil films, singer, film producer and actor
What, no Gun Violence Prevention? Oh well.
I reckon “GVP” will fail, just like all of its euphemistic predecessors. As it should. GVP advocates want to ignore or repeal the Second Amendment and ban civilian firearms ownership. They are gun control advocates, plain and simple.
That’s my take. What do you, a member of TTAG’s AI, think?