By Rob Morse
We all know how to sell something. We also know how to discredit an idea or action. All we have to do is ignore its benefits and inflate its costs. Are those lies exactly? Here is how the mainstream media and anti-gun rights politicians teach low information voters to hate guns and despise gun owners…they lie about them.
Tell only half the truth about armed self-defense. The easiest way for the media and gun prohibition politicians to blame gun owners is to show the harm that criminals do with guns while ignoring the lives that are saved when honest citizens use firearms defensively.
The mainstream media tells us all about the horrific murderers who use gun. At the same time, those same news outlets ignore the commonly occurring events of armed defense that happen every day. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of this lack of balance since media bias isn’t just shaded by a few percent…it’s more like a thousand-fold. That level of willful distortion is commonly called a lie.
We can test that right now. See if you can remember a time when the news told you about a murderer who used a gun. Of course you can, but do you remember when the news media showed you an example of armed defense where the good guys and good gals stopped the attacker and saved lives?
That happens almost 4,600 times a day and yet you can’t remember seeing more than one or two news stories about it. It’s easy to only associate guns and gun owners with murders and robberies when the legacy news media hides half the story.
Misrepresent gang activity as firearms accidents. If you look, you will find more and more stories of young men engaging in violent crime. We now see 12-year-olds as part of armed carjacking gangs. It’s easy to assume that when an 11-, 12-, or a 13-year-old gets shot that it was a tragic firearms accident. That might be true in a small rural town but even 12-year-olds are parts of violent gangs in failed cities.
It’s certainly true that many youngsters are shot as innocent bystanders, but that isn’t a “firearm accident” either. We have to make a clear distinction between an actual accident and homicide. The good news is that both the number and the rate of real firearms accidents have been falling for years. Firearms education and safety programs prevent accidents.
Combine suicides in with homicides. The largest fraction of gun-related deaths are from suicide. Long ago we passed laws that made suicide illegal. But someone who is willing to take their own life isn’t concerned with breaking the law. We passed “red flag” laws that take firearms away from gun owners. We take their guns, but we don’t offer them mental health counseling. We’ve also seen some states impose mandatory waiting periods of 3 to 14 days before you can pick up the gun that’s been purchased.
The claim is that mandatory waiting periods reduce suicide rates. We’re told that we might impulsively use the newly purchased gun to commit suicide, but you wouldn’t use firearms you already have in your home or other means. Waiting periods simply don’t make sense and are inherently dangerous.
Suicide is a real problem that deserves more than imaginary solutions. The number of suicides rises and falls each year, but we haven’t found clear evidence that gun-control laws reduced the rate of suicide. Other countries with strict gun controls have far higher suicide rates.
I have seen the large and sustained efforts that firearms manufacturers, ammunition manufacturers, gun shops, and individual gun owners have put into mental health counseling for gun owners in crises. They helped establish and fund programs like Walk-the-talk America and Hold My Guns.
Conflate gun owners with criminals. Despite what we’re told, we don’t see the rate of crime drop after states impose gun control laws. The reason is obvious since honest people obey gun laws while criminals continue to commit crimes. Unlike us, criminals don’t use gun shops to get their guns. Criminals get their guns the same place they get their drugs. They buy them on the street from other criminals (or steal them).
The news media tell us that making it harder for honest citizens to get guns will somehow change the way criminals behave. That’s magical thinking, not reason. The media tells us that honest, law-abiding gun owners are to blame for the crimes that criminals commit with guns.
Blame lawful gun owners for mass murderers. Honest gun owners are blamed every time a madman commits murder in a “gun-free zone” where the victims are disarmed by law. We’re told that we need to have mandatory background checks to stop mass murderers.
We’re not supposed to look at that statement too closely since mass-murder is pretty much a one-and-done career. When we look, we find that some mass murderers had a criminal record that should have disqualified them from possessing a gun. That prohibition scheme doesn’t work when prosecutors don’t prosecute criminals.
What surprises us is that many crazed mass murderers actually told us why they wanted to kill. We’ve read their journals and manifestos. They want to be famous and will kill to get what they want. The news media is all too eager help.
We were not told that 94% of mass shootings occur in gun free zones. We’re not shown that honest gun owners stopped 104 attempted mass-murders in the last seven years. Where we are allowed to go armed, we stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders in the last few years. If that comes as a surprise to you, you know that the mainstream media has been lying to you. Armed citizens are the cure rather than the disease that caused public violence and celebrity murders.
Portray gun owners as an emotional threat. We’ve seen politicians question our right to defend ourselves. The news media and anti-gun rights activists demean not only guns and gun owners, but even the people who tolerate them.
We’ve talked about facts, but we haven’t talked about feelings very much. There is a reason for all this animosity directed at gun owners.
Gun owners are guilty of wrongthink. Questioning the effectiveness of gun-control laws undercuts the utopian fantasies that underly gun control. We think we’re discussing facts but we are actually shattering their dreams. We’re considered a threat since we ask ordinary people to question the utopian ideals that the gun control industry promises.
It’s comforting to think that getting rid of guns would eliminate violence. Some politicians and activists are strongly attached to that fairy tale. Lawful gun owners are considered a threat because we make the utopians feel insecure.
How dare you put your safety and the safety of your family ahead of my comforting fantasy!
We’ve talked about facts, but if you want to make someone uncomfortable, question their dreams. That explains the vitriol that’s regularly hurled at ordinary citizens who want the means to protect themselves.
Facts matter to those who are influenced by facts. Dreams matter to those who live in their dreams. I will not call my virtue a vice simply to make other people feel more comfortable. Life is too precious for that. I have dreams of the future too, and so do you.
This article originally appeared at Slow Facts and is reprinted here with permission.
hatred of guns is inate, we are born with it and must cultivate desire and fondness.
innate?
It doesn’t look good for slanderous fingerpointing useful idiots when History clearly confirms Gun Control is an agenda with deep roots in racism and genocide.
History has proven Gun Control in any, shape, matter of form is so inherently evil it cannot ever be controlled therefore Gun Control must be abolished like its sidekicks slavery, lynching, concentration camps, gas chambers, etc.
The crime problem boils down to the criminal misuse of firearms, bricks, bats, knives, feet, fists, vehicles, etc. Useful idiots should focus on that for once.
over two hours later you howl at the moon while biting yourself.
Everyone try to recall the CADET CORP that existed for 100 years in the high schools of the USA.
==
In the 9th grade, boys were issued guns and uniforms and trained in military tactics.
Many high schools had indoor gun ranges.
If not, you’d see the boys go home and grab their private rifles to go shooting as they traveled all over the public ways on bikes, buses, trolleys, horseback and even walking.
Every June they would assemble to be reviewed by officials and be given awards.
—————— Boston Common would be filled with thousands of armed CADET CORP who marched there under arms to cheering crowds as the Boston Mayor and Massachusetts Governor handed out awards.
Then under arms the CADETS would march back to the cheering of crowds to stack arms at school.
==
Never again though for the CADETS were disbanded in 1960 for reason unknown.
==
==
“in·nate
in·nate
[iˈnāt]
ADJECTIVE
inborn; natural:
“her innate capacity for organization”
We aren’t born with an innate fear of guns.
Humans are born with only two innate fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud sounds. I guess you could say that ‘Bang’ of a gun being fired is a loud sound but the fear we have when born is about the sound not the gun, when we are born we have no knowledge of such things as a gun but we know what loud sound is in an instinctual way naturally as its part of the survival instinct.
Every thing else we learn to fear we do so through experience (e.g. our personal experience, reading about it, hearing about it, learning about it etc…) or training or ‘life lessons’ (e.g. ‘fire burns’, ‘look both ways before crossing the street’, ‘that knife is sharp and can cut’, etc…).
Philosophically, for fears not gained through experience or training or ‘life lessons’ humans adopt fear that originates in the mind, such as ‘fear of the unknown’ (e.g. Hoplophobia).
we aren’t born with an innate hatred of anything, we learn to and adopt hate.
i know.
but thanks though.
when you can see electricity it’s already too late.
although i’m willing to bet that any newborn would howl with fright at hillary’s visage.
I think you forgot about spiders and snakes. And, possums.
What a dumb statement.
exactly.
cyril connelly?
Apparently, Ugly Moms Demand Action…
I am taught to hate dumbasses.
I hate and despise Democrats.
Marxocrats.
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin
Yeah, you can convince moron to hate just about anything or anyone……..just repeat it enough times!!
I always figured guns were like anything else. You either like’m or you don’t from the very beginning. I was probably 5 or 6 when I first pointed a finger gun and went “bang!” meanwhile my parents were ardent anti’s. Isn’t it the same for the people who don’t like them? They’re just born wrong like left handed people.
All the folks who are malleable and able to be turned this way or that by peers or media don’t count anyway because they’re not real people. Just consumption drones here to make a few unscrupulous individuals very wealthy.
“There is a reason for … animosity directed at gun owners.
Questioning the effectiveness of gun-control laws undercuts the Utopian fantasies that underly gun control. We think we’re discussing facts but we are actually shattering their dreams. We’re considered a threat since we ask ordinary people to question the Utopian ideals that the gun control industry promises.
It’s comforting to think that getting rid of guns would eliminate violence. Some politicians and activists are strongly attached to that fairy tale. Lawful gun owners are considered a threat because we make the Utopians feel insecure.”
That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most poignant and erudite statements that I have ever read/heard.
When do we start wearing our yellow stars?
Dacian and Miner are planning their mass executions. Dacian won’t release his manifesto because it could be considered premeditation.
Oh man the fear & loathing of gats runs overtime in Chiraq and nearby. Yesterday a Chee-ca-go cop got shot to death by a criminal. A gangbanger. This will be counted as “gun violence” instead of people violence. And every AR owner in ILLANNOY is guilty by association of mass murder by an Incel with flower tats on “his” face(sorry if I misgenderd the puke)🙁🙄
Don’t be sorry.
Such assaults only wind them up more.
previously arrested for participating in another shooting where all felony charges were dropped by fox.
i detect a pattern.
It’s all about disarmament so the 1 world government can be achieved.
Hate me, hate my guns, hate me because of my guns, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me what other people think. I think they can F OFF.
I’ll protect me and mine however I can. Guns have always done the job quite well.
As for hating guns … there have been a few that I really disliked nearly too the point of hate.
Tired of the bs,
I empathize with your sentiment.
Allow me to remind readers of an important pearl of wisdom, “You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you.” In other words, ignore politics at your own peril.
The sad-but-true reasoning behind that above pearl of wisdom is quite simple. Evil people are in the world–many in the Ruling Class–and those evil people scheme day-and-night about how to humiliate you, exploit you, harm you, and steal from you. If you ignore that reality, those evil elements of the Ruling Class will take over. And when they do, they will send paid thugs, in overwhelming numbers if necessary, to have their way with you.
Drawing from ancient author Sun Tzu’s Art of War, you are virtually guaranteed to lose when those paid thugs show up in your world because they will show up at the time and place of their choosing, not yours, which gives them an insurmountable advantage. Do you want that to happen?
I will close with this last important pearl of wisdom, “The only fight that we are guaranteed to survive is the fight that never happens at all.” Involving yourself in politics, even minimally, may be all that is needed to stave-off the evil endeavors of the Ruling Class and guarantee your and your family’s survival.
Uncommon
the Art is a great read. many pearls to pick up there.
I don’t care what they think, doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to what they do.
information can at times be your most powerful weapon.
never turn your back on an enemy
no matter how inept they appear
“If you ignore that reality, those evil elements of the Ruling Class will take over.”
They already did.
“And when they do, they will send paid thugs, in overwhelming numbers if necessary, to have their way with you.”
Appealing as this is, they demonstrably don’t have those numbers. They rely on manipulation and cultural enforcement. On these fronts, they are winning bigly.
“…you are virtually guaranteed to lose when those paid thugs show up in your world because they will show up at the time and place of their choosing, not yours…”
Where they win it is because you play by a set of rules that they do not. When you realize the key to flipping this script you will have nothing to fear and they will have everything to fear.
So long as we’re rolling with Asian literary references to combat:
“Know your enemy, know his sword” -Miyamoto Musashi
Or the longer, less personal version from China;
““If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
-Sun Tzu.
Bold = You Are Here at the societal level. The Right fundamentally doesn’t understand their enemy and the Right’s allies (the center) understand neither themselves nor their enemy and hence are not really allies in any real sense.
I hate all the dumbass trolls on this website anymore.
The Truth About Guns was a much better site when R.F. was running it.
here is where debbie’s comment should have been. it would have been no less inspiring.
we need to draw attention to the judges who enable violent criminals to prey upon their victims with impunity. most states have websites that enable people to access court records. when you read about a criminal who gets arrested or convicted of a crime, look up their past offenses. be vigilant for cases that were dismissed or if the criminal was released on minimal or no bail. take note of which judge or judges had given the perp a free pass. TAKE NOTES! Take notice of which judges are lenient to criminals. take notice of which judges are getting people killed because they are lenient to criminals. tell your friends and anyone who will listen. if your judges are elected, write letters to the editor at reelection time. in particularly egregious cases such as a mass shooting, you might want to have a quarry deliver a truck load of pit run to be dumped on the courthouse steps. the implication of a good old fashioned public stoning of a negligent judge that would enable everyone to participate will be eloquent.
retain judge=no
Sounds about right to me. Seems the Leftist Control Freaks have been trying to do away with gun ownership for some time using every propaganda ploy in the book.
If is bleeds it leads. Shootings make headlines and headlines sell media. I think it gives readers a feeling of superiority to think they would never shoot anybody, and if some else owns a gun it must be because they plan to shoot someone.
Compare gun deaths to fentanyl poisonings. Close to 90,000 people die from fentanyl poisoning a year versus maybe 10,000 actual murders. It fentanyl got the coverage guns do, there would be a sea change on that issue.
There’s an easily adaptable meme for this.
A person says that they want regulations to improve the environment and this will require dismantling the patriarchal capitalist system.
When asked about nuclear power the person responds “But then how will we destroy the patriarchal capitalist system”?
IRL, all of this “smuggling” by the antis follows an extremely predictable (and easily short circuit-able) methodology. It’s quite literally the playbook they use for everything.
They’ve written it down. You can read it and then beat them on all their fronts. The problem isn’t that their arguments are so deft at misdirection, it’s that no one really reads what these people have written for 150 years.
And now they control most of society via gatekeeping. Because they’ve been unopposed. Mostly that means you have to let their unworkable system run to completion and then deal with the mess. If you survive it.
In case you haven’t noticed most of the anti-gun people are almost totally ignorant of the issues nor do they know the first thing about firearms. They use their devious tactics because there are too many people in this Country who are too lazy to look up the facts which are readily available to dispute the propaganda they hear on a daily basis. The ability to seek the truth no longer exists with many people who prefer to be treated like mindless robots who enjoy being manipulated. Also, finding the truth on many issues is confounded by the manipulation of what you read by the authors. Those of you who are moderates, conservatives, independents, etc., need to understand one thing. The radical Left does not care about logic, ethics, facts, morality, honesty or anything but the quest for power and control. That is why it defies understanding to even attempt to clarify how they could be so devoid of humanity.
The radical Left does not care about logic, ethics, facts, morality, honesty or anything but the quest for power and control. That is why it defies understanding to even attempt to clarify how they could be so devoid of humanity.
The radical Left cares deeply about all these things. It is the skillful manipulation of these things which grants them their intermediate power until the *glorious Revolution*, which they intend to bring about by amassing enough power to do so.
None of what they do, nor what they are, defies understanding any more than meeting another culture defies understanding. Both require a certain degree of study. The understanding is quite easy to attain if you actually read their literature, which nearly no one outside of the [academic] Left actually does.
The Left’s power comes from three major fountainheads. The two you care about are their manipulations and nearly complete ignorance of those manipulations by the adversaries of the Left. The Left fights with weapons the Right doesn’t understand and often claims don’t exist.
The third is that they’re high on their own supply, true believers who are self-brainwashing. To some extent that makes them victims of a self-replicating ideology that they, themselves, didn’t invent but it also means that unless you can come up with a way to break them out of it they have to be treated in a manner similar to a rabid dog. Which is not to say “put them down” but you can’t get wrapped up in the fact that they’re victims because while they mostly are victims they’re also quite dangerous if left unattended. Think of them like zombies, I guess, for whom we are trying to find a cure but in the meantime must take precautions against.
Expanding on the Right’s ignorance of the Left; Much of that ignorance is accidentally championed by the people who are against the Left, not because they’re “controlled oppo” but because they fundamentally misunderstand what they are up against and have been manipulated into avoiding reading the warning label as if the warning label were itself the hazard. This is the root of people saying “they’re crazy” or “they make no sense”. Untrue. They make sense within the confines of their own schema, which if you don’t get it, seems to produce erratic and self-damaging behavior. This is a fundamental misread of behavior that is directed towards a goal and has been shockingly adept at achieving the intermittent steps along the way to that goal.
It is understanding the general rules that leads to predictive power of future specific behavior, not the other way around. The Right (read: anyone not far Left) needs to learn this, fast. Continuing to deny it or trying to fight it on “rational” grounds without understanding how it functions is a fool’s errand.
Years back (~2015/6/7), right here on TTAG, I predicted the current strange sex stuff pretty accurately. That wasn’t by accident. It wasn’t a guess. I looked at their general rules, where they were, what they were pushing on and extrapolated forward. Most people here dismissed those comments as offhand musings, and probably no one other than me remembers them.
This is somewhat similar to ESG, I suppose. Just a few days ago I was told here on TTAG that ESG is small and ineffectual. Yet it controls companies from BP to Disney. It is the reason behind Discover Financial’s recent move on codes, which is itself just a step towards another goal that is openly stated elsewhere if you care to look.
Strange, that. It’s also interesting to note that just the three largest ESG companies on the planet control most of the pension funds and have a combined $53 trillion in AUM. They also, by proxy, control both each other and dozens of the smaller top 50 or so Asset Management Companies because those three majors when combined own controlling stakes in many of the smaller companies. In effect, they’re all one *diversified conglomerate*.
And what do I mean about this manipulation? Well, for an example look at the current *market thinking*. You think the current dip in inflation is the trend that will continue, or will it reverse and will inflation come roaring back? Can the Fed affect it? If you’re paying attention you have one view, if you’re just watching CNBC/Fox/whatever, you’re being manipulated. And there’s an obvious outcome for those being manipulated. Whether by design or happenstance the outcome is the same. The retirees get strip mined and the ones saying the loudest now that this won’t happen for a variety of reasons will be the ones in a few years screaming that it did happen to them.
Gun control now!
Gun control tomorrow!
And gun control forever!
The 21st century update. video 1 min long
Guns are basic human right.