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courtesy linkedin.com

By Johannes P.

Every once in a while, people who live and work inside the Washington D.C. Beltway forget that they’re not supposed to openly admit that their job consists of lying to the people they putatively serve. In a surprisingly honest (to a point) recent column in the Washington Post, Daniel “Danny” Franklin, a consultant who advises the White House on public opinion and communications, rhetorically asks why the Democrats’ legislative efforts to roll back civil rights after the Sandy Hook attack didn’t go as well as they’d hoped . . .

For progressives, there’s an easy answer — the money and lobbying clout of the National Rifle Association. This has an obvious appeal and even a modicum of truth. But as a Democratic strategist who looks at the relationship between public opinion and political reality, I fear that this answer has become a crutch: a comforting story progressives tell ourselves to avoid facing the fact that the country trusts the NRA more than us on this issue.

Is this a rare blast of common sense in an increasingly authoritarian left, you might ask?

No, not one bit. First of all, we don’t even know if Danny’s really a lefty. After all, he is just an intellectual mercenary who sells his “communication” skills to the highest bidder. I suppose we all have to put food on the table somehow.

Second, even though Danny stumbled over the truth in the opening of his column, he managed to stand up, brush himself off, and resume his normal course. Franklin admits that, “The political approach to gun control has only aggravated many Americans’ sense of helplessness. By connecting gun laws to high-profile tragedies, we remind people that current laws are failing to prevent those tragedies, undermining our own argument….”  So instead, he suggests that Democrats try a different tack: a “public health approach”, which he believes would:

  • “[a]void divisive efforts to pass laws that compel behavior and instead focus on persuading people of the inherent risks of guns by highlighting the more than 600 fatal gun accidents that occur each year”;
  • provide “incentives for gun buyers to choose a weapon designed so it cannot be fired by anyone other than its owner. Positioned as a way to reduce accidents and thefts, this could appeal to responsible gun owners”; and
  • focus on gun control “successes” i.e., that gun control led to the general reduction in crimes committed with firearms since 1993, as a means to generate support.

Well, there you have it folks. The strategy is no longer to say that they’re not going to take your guns away while they try to pass laws to take your guns away. Instead, Danny and his paymasters are going to try to convince you just how frighteningly dangerous guns are, to ‘incentivize you’ (at the point of a bayonet?) to buy unproven technology, and at the same time take credit for (non-existent) gun control successes. Clever new tactics, same old lies.

We all knew that this was the only course they had left, but it’s kind of refreshing to see them openly admit it, no?

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65 COMMENTS

  1. “…refreshing to see them openly admit it, no?”

    Revealing; and what national news medium will report such an admission?

    Only a public health issue discussion will ever reach viewers.

  2. Not looking forward to whatever tactics arise in the aftermath of such a potential change in stratagem. It’s a pretty one-sided fight as things now stand, with a massively roused and expanded gun-rights community, slight (but important) rollbacks in slave-states and even glimmering calls for expansion of gun rights in other nations. If this mental health tactic is adopted, it will probably fail. Hard. And speaking as someone who wants to keep the looming threat of open violence far on the horizon for as long as possible, I hope that the gun control movement doesn’t decide that they’ve run out of options for tacitly convincing people of their view.

    Because that could turn ugly in a hurry.

  3. In the words of Charlie Sheen “#winning”

    Now let’s get our hands on Shannon’s letter of “resignation” that we all know Bloomy’s minions are preparing, which have nothing to do with her utter failure to get anything done despite his millions. /sarc off

    • Sorry, but I for one do NOT want Shannon to go away. She’s the best person we could possibly have for the opposition. The only real problem I have with her is that I suspect she may be the one more responsible for the .22LR shortage from all the new dads and kids out shooting now.

      Besides… if RF isn’t going to give us links to Israeli supermodels, at least we should be able to have your torrid fantasies.

  4. Rules 6, 7 and 10.

    “…the sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

    …the seventh rule is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

    The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”

  5. As before, vigilance will be our friend.

    During the gun control scramble following Sandy Hook, there was a genuine grassroots effort of gun owners taking non-gun owners out shooting. Doing education. Really teaching people about guns. There was a broad push to show how effective guns have been in defending the lives and property of private citizens, which had to be done grassroots because the media would ignore or actively bury it.

    This will have to continue. If they are going to try and scare the public away from guns then it will be our responsibility to show that a gun is no more scary than a car, blender, or kitchen knife. We all use tools that could potentially kill us everyday. I’ve injured myself far more often and severely with regular hand tools than firearms. Life is risk.

    On the other hand, the gun control crowd still seems to be underestimating how popular guns are. The hoplophones are loud, but seem to be in the minority.

    • “I’ve injured myself far more often and severely with regular hand tools than firearms. Life is risk.”

      True story. A few years ago I was re-installing my closet door and I needed a lot of leverage to lift the door over the mount on the floor. So I employed a huge screw driver to get leverage. Of course you need a fulcrum (pivot point) to get leverage. So I used the palm of my hand as a fulcrum. Even that wasn’t enough. So I clenched the screwdriver as hard as I could with both hands and applied as much force as I could muster on that closet door. Naturally the screw driver slipped and I ended up literally punching myself in the face — really hard and it really hurt a lot. In fact I punched my face so hard that my neck muscles were sore the next day.

      I know, everyone thought I was going to say how I somehow gashed myself with the screwdriver. Thankfully that didn’t happen. My own fist thrusting into my face was enough. (Not sure what hurt more, my face or my pride.) But the point is that there is risk of injury in almost everything every day. Rather than try to avoid all risks, I manage risks.

      • If it becomes clear that we’re not going to be able to get legislation that bans the use of fulcrums, we’ll pivot quickly over to the National Fulcrum Database idea, and also try to stick in a requirement of 500 hours of classroom time for the permits.

        We’ll show those damned dirty fulcrumists. Remember, these are the same people who think they can just sell e-cigs without our approval. Silly little munchkins . . .

      • Outlaw fists!! LOL.

        I truly laughed out loud reading your description of what you did. Sorry to laugh at your accident. At least you weren’t stuck with the screwdriver!

        • “At least you weren’t stuck with the screwdriver!”

          Way to turn the screws on him by hitting him when he’s down.

      • I understand. I punched an engine block in bitter cold weather when the socket slid off the starter bolt, so I switched hands and (yup) did it again with the other hand. I am not normally given to displays of emotion, but I wanted to cry at the utter unfairness of it all.

      • John Wiseman who wrote the SAS Survival Guide wrote a follow-up called the Urban Survival Guide (and even a specific Australian version) after returning home from 4-months in a war zone without a scratch, in less than 10 minutes afterwards he had a large cut on his head from kitchen cupboard door. He then thought about other domestic hazards and expanded into urban hazards, and then wrote a book about them.

      • Then there was the time I was trying to fix something in my bathroom (I forget what now) and got frustrated, and headed to the toolbox – which was in another room – to get another tool. In my haste/frustration, I smacked into the corner by the linen closet. Got a pretty big bruise on my upper arm. Finished the project, forgot about the bruise until a couple days later when I went for my annual well-woman exam. My OB-GYN looked at the bruise, then looked wordlessly at me. I sighed, assured him it wasn’t domestic violence, then told him the story. He thought it was pretty funny.

        • My wife tripped and fell, producing a winner of a bruise on her cheek. The very next day she interviewed for an internship with a domestic violence shelter. “I fell” got exactly the reaction you would expect.

  6. And it is precisely the fact that the left is scheming, as well they should be doing, that we need to be extremely careful not to line up behind nut jobs and other miscreants and use them as poster children for our concerns.

    Beat the other side at their own game.

    Round up folks who have used firearms to protect and save their lives or the lives of their loved ones and claim this as the “public health” reason why guns are important safety tools to have, like being able to use a fire extinguisher, etc.

    The rabid “damn the torpedoes” approach to these issues is not useful nor will it work.

    It may feel great to launch a great Banzai attack, but in the end all you get is corpses and nothing else.

    Politics is the art of the possible.

  7. First of all, we don’t even know if Danny’s really a lefty. After all, he is just an intellectual mercenary who sells his “communication” skills to the highest bidder.

    The fact that he does that means he’s a statist, whether he wants to beat liberty to death with the left hand of the state or the right is immaterial.

  8. “focus on gun control “successes” i.e., that gun control led to the general reduction in crimes committed with firearms since 1993…”

    Yeah. Good luck with that, Danny.

    While I truly hope they try such an ill-advised strategy because it will highlight the fact that we really are safer from violent crimes today than twenty years ago, I think they know it would never work. The truth would hit them in the face like a Mack truck.

    • Perhaps he’d care to explain why, if the decline was due to gun control laws:

      1) The fraction of homicides committed with firearms remained stable throughout this period, around two-thirds?

      2) The decline began before Brady Act came into effect?

      • 3) The decline continued after expiration of the “assault weapons” ban.
        4) The decline occured while dozens of states enacted right-to-carry legislation.
        5) The decline continued during record-setting periods of gun and ammunition sales.
        Etc., etc., etc.

        • The “assault weapon ban” caused me to buy a preban AR-15 the day it was signed, when I’d never wanted one before. So, in my personal case it did not cause me to do without, quite the opposite. Then, in ’94 TX passed “shall issue” which I (and a lot of others) credit with crime reductions. Yet this fool sounds like he really believes that, advocates building a case on it as though nobody could possibly question his assertion. Amazing.

    • You know what else came out in 1993? Doom, the most well known ultra-violent first person shooter video game. Ever since it came out on December 10, 1993, the violent crime rates have steadily dropped, while the technology behind FPS games has only improved.

      It also marked the 20 year anniversary of Roe v Wade, which legalized abortion. And the statistically proven age at which adolescents are most likely to commit violent crimes is? 18-25 years old.

      I can play the game of “Guess-the-causality” too! Fun for the whole family.

    • I like it!
      And write off all of my “gun safety” training classes, including all of the “consumable materials” the class requires.

      • Both have been proposed in the House and both shot down.

        If they cared about accidents, they would have better education and possibly PSA messages and yes, have a tax deduction of up to $1000 for a 100% Made in the USA Safe. That sounds more logical than fixing the problem by taking guns away.

        The fact that no “gun safety” group has actually proposed such “common sense” approaches as Free Training, Gun Awareness Seminars, Tax Breaks for Safes and Tax deductions for gun training says they don’t give a crap about safety and just want to take away the guns — plain and simple — sometimes it is not what you say, but how you act and they act like gun grabbers and could give two sh!ts about safety.

      • And the gubt should build thousands of nice, safe firing ranges for people to use for free, keeping that nasty shooting away from the children (remember the children?).

      • I just want a free safe. No one said I owned guns. A lot of people use guns safes for non-gun things.

        • Yeah. That’s it! What he said. I sold all my guns at a gun show! Except the ones lost when the canoe overturned!

        • Yes, officer, I traded in all of my guns for this gun safe.
          Yes, officer, I do appreciate the irony of that statement.
          No, officer, we can’t open it, I forgot the combination.

  9. There seems to be a relationship between the number of journalists who identify as democrats and the number of Americans who own a gun. As the number of pro democrat-party anti-gun journalists increase so too does the number of Americans who own guns.

    Obama is the #1 RKBA salesman. Anti-gun journalists are the best marketing/advertising team any gun maker could ask for.

  10. “…the country trusts the NRA more than us on this issue.”
    S#!t! The country trusts a guy with one shifty eye, trying to peddle “Rolex” watches out of a duffle bag in the Morocco Bazaar, more than the progressive elite.

  11. “[a]void divisive efforts to pass laws that compel behavior and instead focus on persuading people of the inherent risks of guns by highlighting the more than 600 fatal gun accidents that occur each year”;
    600 wow! that’s more than the yearly auto accident deaths…in 1907. The latest auto fatality numbers are 60 times as high as the gun accident fatalities. Are cars now a public health issue?
    Fatal drowning accidents outnumber fatal firearms accidents by a factor of 10. Is that a public health issue?

    provide “incentives for gun buyers to choose a weapon designed so it cannot be fired by anyone other than its owner. Positioned as a way to reduce accidents and thefts, this could appeal to responsible gun owners”; and
    On behalf of responsible gun owners: no, it does not appeal to us. Responsible gun owners don’t need this, because our guns are either securely locked up, or in our immediate possession at all times.

    focus on gun control “successes” i.e., that gun control led to the general reduction in crimes committed with firearms since 1993, as a means to generate support.
    Didn’t the DOJ report find that the 1993 ban had zero effect on crime rates? Oh yeah, it did.

    • And they’ll still chime that 600 proudly, as if it were 600 million. They’ll say

      “Over six HUNDRED people are gruesomely killed each year by sudden accidental gun discharges!”

    • Hey, don’t speak for me! He said the magic word, “incentives”! For $5000 I will spend up to $2000 to buy a firearm which cannot be fired by anyone but me. In fact, I won’t care if it can’t be fired by me, either, since it will be in the back of a drawer somewhere, and never used. I can help your numbers, BTW, I’d like a thousand of those.

  12. Dear Daniel “Danny” Franklin:

    Most gun owners want to be left alone. All the laws passed since Sandy Hook will do and have done jack to reduce crime or accidents in any meaningful way.

    Using the same words as Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor–

    “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

    Gun owners are vested. You go after the NRA as it is some single corporate entity — we are the NRA. You fight one, you fight us all and we have great resolve — Remember CO, there will be more to come this November. We will not rest until the mess of gun laws created after Sandy Hook are completely undone. The DNC did this to itself, it should stuck to fixing the ACA mess than screwing with people who have been unfairly targeted and are not afraid to fight back

    • The major failing of the DNC is that it’s comprised of 20 different factions going in 20 different directions at once. Of course, the RNC would be the same, but is so old it can’t get up to move. And the Libertarians are waiting for the space ship to come and take them to where they want to go.

      It really is time for a viable third party.

  13. There are three flaws in the gun control industry’s tactics:

    (1) There are 100 million+ gun owners who have direct positive experience with firearms. Their experience is generally positive and we are good at transmitting that positive experiece to other whether they wish to own firearms or not. My answer to my gun control supporting neighbors on gun safety has always been do you feel unsafe because 1/3 of your neighbors live in armed households? Overall the large number of gun owners means that we can outspend Bloomberg and company by crowd sourcing which is basically what the NRA does.

    (2) They have fallen for one of the biggest traps in the PSYOPS business, i.e., that you end up as the only people to believe your own propaganda.

    (3) The current crowd in the White House is wedded to Saul Alinsky’s tactics as spelled out in Rules for Radicals. A quick examination of the history of the application of these tactics shows an overall failure. Alinksy’s rules work on people who already sympathetic to the pressure group. Use those tactics on Snidely Whiplash and he laughs in your face.

  14. The tactic we should truly fear is not the legislating away of our gun rights, the future leftist supreme court or even the repeal of the 2A. What we should fear are government regulations like those put forth by the EPA or other government agencies that will be a back door to restrict and limit our RTKBA. How can we express our God given right if we can’t find or afford ammo, have a range to shoot at, can’t afford the insurance required to keep firearms, etc? This is my fear.

  15. First of all, we don’t even know if Danny’s really a lefty. Ah, yes we do. This can be easily inferred by reading his company bio and his Linked-in page. No one other than a committed progressive gets jobs like the ones that he has had. I like the phrase “intellectual mercenary” but Danny is more of a SpecOps leftist warrior.

  16. I predicted something like this about three months ago. The recent uptick in gun grabbers’ wailing and gnashing of teeth is their last, desperate action. They know they are on the ropes and went “all in”. The results:
    (a) Gun grabbers couldn’t even get universal background checks “with 90% public support”. (Not actually true but their supporters don’t know any better.)
    (b) Good people continue to acquire concealed handgun carry licenses in droves … or carry without licenses in Constitutional carry states.
    (c) Good people are purchasing their first firearm and going to ranges in droves.
    (d) For the first time ever, the Chief of Police in a large city where Democrats have dominated politics for the last 50 years (Detroit) has embraced concealed carry and encouraged residents to get their licenses.
    (e) Gun rights supporters outnumber gun grabbers by a factor of at least 10 to 1 at their respective rallies.

    I will keep saying it: we. are. winning. I know the 80 million people in Hawaii, Coastal California, Cook County Illinois, and the Washington D.C. – Boston Megalopolis have lost ground. The other 230 million people in the nation are retaking ground at an alarming rate — alarming if you are a gun grabber that is.

    Gun grabbers are now turning to our tactics — trying to … wait for it … persuade people with (albeit faux) facts!!! (Gasp!) What is the saying, imitation is the highest form of flattery?

  17. This is like when they “reframed” the Iraq war with Cindy Sheehan. Can’t spit on hippies when they’re doing it “for the children.” They are looking for a suitable victim group to demonize now that the NRA is not a good boogey man anymore.

  18. Cars, pools, household chemicals and high places like stairs and balconies are all deadlier than firearms. Talk about those things first. None are ancillary to personal defense like a firearm, and no, calling and waiting 10-30 minutes for someone with a gun to show up is not an option ever.

  19. Regarding Mr. Franklin’s observation that violent crime rates have been steadily falling since 1993 to the levels that we have not seen since the 1960s, I am confident that these factors are almost totally responsible:
    (1) Elimination of leaded gasoline and resulting violent behavioral effects
    (2) Fewer would be violent criminals from broken homes due to widespread abortion
    (3) More effective policing
    (4) More armed citizens either dissuading or outright eliminating violent criminals

    What I cannot begin to imagine is that any “gun control” measures played even a minuscule role in the now 21 year downward trend in violent crimes.

    • (1) except we had low crime rates in the 50’s with all that leaded gasoline and we have very high crime rates where lead was really problem in the inner cities. I agree with the other reasons. Let’s also not forget that murder and violent crime is concentrated a very narrow portion of the population and that high murder rates will undoubtedly reduce the future murder rate as the population that murders is reduced.

    • Need to add that the surge in crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s was a result of the baby boom generation arriving at the age where criminal activity begins. The crime rate had begun to taper off by the early 80s just in time for the Justice Department to win the battle against organized crime only to set off gang and drug wars among claimants to the throne. The basic crime rate fell in the 90s because the drug war had it winners and the baby boom echo generation started to age out.

  20. “…..more than 600 fatal gun accidents that occur each year…..”

    While the 2+ million abortions performed in this country every year are not a health issue?

    ….Crickets….

  21. “Franklin admits that, “The political approach to gun control has only aggravated many Americans’ sense of helplessness. ”

    And whether he intended to or not, most TTAG’ers would agree that one thing that divides the pros and the antis is that the anti’s have no problem with helplessness, while it is anathema to the pros.

  22. Framing gun control as a public health issue isn’t a new tack. It’s recycling an old one. See former surgeon general Jocelyn Elders. The effort failed.

  23. Guns can be a health issue. Plenty of people have been saved by guns.

    If it saves one life, right?

    • Certainly, in fact it can be looked at through a health filter. 600 accidental shooting deaths, or 31,000 ‘gun’ deaths from all causes, 98,000 deaths do to medical accidents/negligence. 80K to 1.2M DGUs Vs how many people would die without advanced medical care (millions each year surely). So guns can be dangerous but save many more lives than they take, medicine can be dangerous but saves many more lives than it takes. If the argument to ban guns carries any weight as a public health issue, then the argument to ban medicine must carry roughly equal weight, especially given that medicine kills three times more people than guns (never minding that it also certainly saves more as well).

  24. I see this has already been addressed to some degree but I can’t resist serially refuting these:

    ◾“[a]void divisive efforts to pass laws that compel behavior and instead focus on persuading people of the inherent risks of guns by highlighting the more than 600 fatal gun accidents that occur each year”;

    600 fatalities out of a population of 310,000,000 works out to 0.00019% or ,simply put, a number so statistically insignificant that it’s laughable to call it a public health crisis or even an issue. Medical negligence/errors account for 98,000 fatalities or 0.03% of the population, 163 times more deadly than accidental shootings. If you wish to really do something about problems in the public health sphere, work on medical errors, you can to 163 times more good in that field and never infringe on anyone’s rights or leave anyone defenseless. At the same time there were over 14,000 murders, many of which we know were preventable had the intended victim been armed with a gun (from DGU statistics). Arguably the most likely outcome of additional gun control is an increase in murder rates. Any time one discusses numbers like 600 individuals in a nation as populous as the US there must be some other agenda than public safety driving the focus on that issue. Consider that the odds of being killed for any reason with a gun in the US (murder, suicide and accidental combined) is 0.00001% or 1 in 10,000 (31,000 deaths for 310M people) while the odds of a child being diagnosed with autism is 1 in 68. Read that last sentence again and tell me that more effort is needed in gun control in terms of public health. Any real, honest interest in the greater public health would clearly focus on autism, then perhaps heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and a host of other problems such as addiction and mental health issues long before it got to gun control. It’s absurd to talk about guns as a public health issues without first addressing all these others and more, it’s like removing one empty can from a dump and calling it a clean up effort.

    ◾provide “incentives for gun buyers to choose a weapon designed so it cannot be fired by anyone other than its owner. Positioned as a way to reduce accidents and thefts, this could appeal to responsible gun owners”; and

    I think this simply demonstrates ignorance regarding what appeals to gun owners. Looks, functionality and safety all certainly do as well as reliability, concealment value, power, capacity and a host of other factors. What doesn’t seem to appeal is a gun designed for no other reason that the fact that anti RKBA groups wish it to be, and one with complicated on board systems that would tend to make it less reliable while massively increasing it’s cost.
    If not ignorance then this must be an attempt to position anyone who doesn’t wish to convert to ‘smart’ guns as unreasonable and unconcerned about safety.

    ◾focus on gun control “successes” i.e., that gun control led to the general reduction in crimes committed with firearms since 1993, as a means to generate support.

    This is pure moonbat. It hardly deserves a response but here goes:
    The violent crime rate has been dropping steadily since 1993 while in those years more than 30 states became shall issue CCW permit states or constitutional carry states. While it doesn’t show causation for crime reduction it does at the very least demonstrate that more guns in more hands has in no way increased violent crime. Since 1993 the AWB has come and gone, sales of guns have skyrocketed and there are more, and more types of guns available more easily to more people that there have been since well before 1993, still, the violent crime rate continues to decline. I have no idea what success of gun control could be pointed out as having done anything about crime what so ever and it’s obvious that the gun control ‘losses’ well outnumber the successes anyway. Again it’s impossible to tell whether Mr. Franklin is simply ignorant to this facts or dishonestly misrepresenting them or delusional enough to believe that gun control ‘success’ have actually reduced crime, however it’s clear that one of more of these factors is at play in his statement.

    So, is this a real shift in direction for the gun control crowd? Let’s see, there are misrepresented facts, apparent ignorance to reality, evidence of a concealed agenda, suggestions of duplicity and signs of outright madness being paraded as ‘reasonable’ ideas. Nope, SSDD for the forces of gun control, a rose by any other name. . .

  25. what he saying is they should lie, when they dont have any facts……

    “So instead, he suggests that Democrats try a different tack: a “public health approach”, which he believes would:

    #1 “[a]void divisive efforts to pass laws that compel behavior and instead focus on persuading people of the inherent risks of guns by highlighting the more than 600 fatal gun accidents that occur each year”;

    #2 provide “incentives for gun buyers to choose a weapon designed so it cannot be fired by anyone other than its owner. Positioned as a way to reduce accidents and thefts, this could appeal to responsible gun owners”;

    #3 and focus on gun control “successes” i.e., that gun control led to the general reduction in crimes committed with firearms since 1993, as a means to generate support.”

    #1 Every day, about ten people die from unintentional drowning. Of these, two are children aged 14 or younger. Drowning ranks fifth among the leading causes of unintentional injury death in the United States.

    #2 does not exist in any usable or reliable form.

    #3 “gun control” has ZERO to do with the crime rate drop, ALL violent crime has been on the decline.

    http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1993-2012.xls

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