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Gun control advocates know the key to tricking people into supporting civilian disarmament: demonize the enemy. The enemy being anyone who opposes civilian disarmament. Which is, it must be said, a great many people. Millions of people, from all walks of life. Americans of all colors, creeds and religions support the Second Amendment. Democrats and Republicans, gay and straight, old and young, urban and rural. This transcendent – perhaps transcendental – love of firearms freedom makes the gun grabbers’ anti-agitprop a difficult proposition. But not impossible . . .

The “gun lobby” is the gun grabbers’ go-to bugaboo. It’s composed of unnamed firearms industry magnates and their supposed mouthpiece, the NRA. As the above video illustrates, the former is portrayed as a conclave of craven capitalists who dance in the blood of innocents. The National Rifle Association is positioned as their evil minions, stalking the corridors of power to seduce the people’s representatives on behalf of the rapacious manufacturers – when they’re not busy stoking the fires of racial hatred and paranoia amongst America’s bitter clingers.

This cartoonish characterization works best among so-called “low-information” voters; people who don’t have the time or inclination to pay attention to the meme behind that curtain. Which is not to say that “evil gun lobby” propaganda doesn’t resonate with left-leaning intellectuals, too. The concept of a profit-driven conspiracy to thwart “common sense” gun control pushes all the left’s buttons, from their hatred of free markets to their belief that a cabal of intelligence-challenged country club conservatives stand in the way of an egalitarian utopia.

Fortunately, gun grabbers have failed to fully embrace Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Perhaps they’re triskaidekaphobic. Rule 13 advises agitators to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” How can you personalize a group as inherently amorphous as the “gun lobby”? OK, the Nazis did a fair job with the Jews. And Wayne LaPierre is a pretty good poster boy for anti-OFWG (Old Fat White Guys) animus. But most Americans who care about such things – a small group to be sure – see the NRA for what they are: an advocacy group representing millions of gun owners.

In some ways gun control advocates who demonize the “gun lobby” are doing gun rights advocates a favor. When Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America claims that the “gun lobby” wants “guns everywhere” – as they did during their singularly ineffective campaign against Georgia’s recent extension of firearms freedom – the militant Moms are promoting the idea of eliminating “gun-free zones.” Every time the gun grabbers warn of Wild West shootouts, every time blood doesn’t run in the streets following concealed and open carry liberalization, the “guns everywhere” concept gains a measure of acceptability.

Of course, we all know that the “gun lobby” does exist. American is home to a dynamic firearms industry profiting from citizens exercising their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. And yes, the firearms industry has lavished cash contributions on the organizations that work to defend and extend gun rights and, thus, protect and enlarge their market: the NRA, NSSF (National Shooting Sports Foundation), SAF (Second Amendment Foundation) and even this website (e.g., FN’s and GLOCK’s advertising).

But this “gun lobby” does not revel in bloodshed. It strives to ensure that Americans have access to tools they can use to put food on their tables, protect themselves from criminal predation, enjoy their well-earned leisure time and defend against government tyranny. In the main,  the “gun lobby” is a force for good. (We’ll discuss gun makers’ collusion with the U.S. government’s surreptitious efforts to supply firearms to vicious drug thugs, corrupt cops and unaccountable military men south of the border at a later date.) Those who can’t see the benefits of a healthy industry and powerful pro-gun advocates never will.

Again, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. By banging-on about “the [evil] gun lobby” the antis perpetuate the “lobby’s” influence. (Alinsky: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”) In fact, we should be thankful that gun grabbers can’t grasp the simple idea that the “gun lobby” owes it existence to popular support, both financial and political. If civilian disarmament advocates made that leap they might devise a new and possibly more effective strategy for their assault on gun rights. In that sense, their ignorance is our bliss.

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121 COMMENTS

  1. The problem the antis face is that, ultimately, their cause has no factual basis. The reason Sandy Hook wasn’t our Waterloo as gun owners is because even the low information voters understand that crazy people do crazy things.

    Further, the only places which actually advanced anti gun regulations were areas already culturally biased against gun ownership.

    Which brings me to another reason why their movement ends in the next twenty years- I say that because even in anti rights areas, people are getting positive exposures to firearms. Thanks to the Internet, people who would be behind a media “blockade” are instead exposed to good examples of law abiding citizens using guns properly, like Hickock45 among others. New Yorkers, Californians, and Chicagoans watching him wring out a Glock wonder why the same thing is illegal in their neck of the woods.

    If there’s anything we need to be concerned about, it is NOT a direct assault on our rights via open legislation. That’s a battle they’ve lost. No, we need to be concerned if they go after the FIRST AMENDMENT . Without true exercise of free speech, Hickock45, TTAG, and tens of gun forums and hundreds of educational gun blogs hit the skids. And with it, the positive voices for the RKBA.

    • Very good points. The information war is the MOST important. The liberal media won’t do it so the internet does. Far more people get their facts , right or wrong, from the internet than the 6 o clock news man basing guns. The antis know this but they are way behind. They embraced Twitter, now they are playing catch up on the web.
      Then liberal news anchor can be fact checked and dismissed in seconds.

    • Bingo!

      CONTROLLING THE EXPRESSION OF IDEAS AND THE FLOW OF INFORMATION IS THE GOAL! (sorry for shouting).

      If you control the language and the expression of ideas, you eventually kill the idea because there is no way to propagate it.

      It’s not just guns but everything that the “government” finds unnerving.

      It’s in the anti-bullying meme, in how the UN will define “human rights” to cover “internet freedom”, and in Senator Charles Shumer pushing for the “Journalist Shield Law” (which will basically regulate and license “journalists” and leave everyone else out to dry; great way to keep tee journalists in line and a huge bunch will march right into the flames because it’ll be “cool to be licensed”).

      We do a good job calling it out in the RKBA area but it’s going on everywhere and at the same time.

      If you can’t ever see Hickock45, you’ll never get infected with his sense of freedom and ask “why can’t I do that where I live” and “he’s clearly not wantonly killing people, they told me that’s all guns are good for”.

      For many people, the urban reality of their daily lives will wipe out any ideas of anything different out beyond the beltway if they can’t get exposed to it.

      Call out the BS when you see it.

  2. The most common comment I hear from politicians when addressing their pro-gun opponents is that they are simply mindless drones for whatever the NRA wants them to say and do.

    These kinds of comments are all about persuading the ignorant hoi polloi to vote for them.

    Nothing surprising here.

    On the other hand the “massive gun lobby” is what causes NO major gun print media periodical ever to deliver objective gun reviews.

    When is the last time you have read a negative gun review in any major gun magazine? How about … never?

    • The massive gun lobby is not gun print media’s issue. The problem is having an advertising revenue stream that comes exclusively from the manufacturers that they are reviewing.

    • You need to check out Gun Tests magazine if you want “unvarnished truth”. Expensive, but well worth it. Also, Guns & Ammo “Handguns” has had some terrific articles that did not involve any quid-pro-quo. Happy reading.

      • Yes, I’m a subscriber to Gun Tests, they do a very fine job. I also appreciate, on the whole, the gamut of good YouTube channels that will generally give you a good overview of pros/cons, at least a whole lot more than any typical commercial gun magazines, which NEVER have a negative word to say about any aspect of any firearm they are reviewing.

        • Agree. A well-winnowed selection of web sites and YouTube channels provides more accurate and timely information than any “gun publication.”

          I’ve actually never purchased a gun-oriented magazine in my lifetime. What would be the point? I’ve never purchased a gun that hadn’t been for sale for a few years, with a track record among shooters.

          The entire “gun rights or gun control: you decide!” BS is just another silly issue clogging voter bandwidth. The important issues are things like “who decides civil servant pensions, how, and why? What professions have obtained legislative protections of their profits which hurt consumers, and how?” I still can’t stomach the fact that Americans get worked up about Sandy Hook, but not the little black kids, who are ignored. Apparently latent racism is bad right up ’til the moment some libs want to play to it, reinforce it.

          I deeply resent the post video’s use of a Christian carol to evoke sympathy.

    • If you mean “why can’t I find unbiased truthful reviews and tests of firearms and ammunition in Guns & Ammo, Shotgun News, Shooting Times, Shotgun, Handguns, or Rifle Shooter magazines, perhaps it is because they are all owned by the same group, Intermedia Holdings, and controlled by the same person, Leo Hindery.

      Hindery is unashamedly a Democrat and in favor of restrictions on the types of guns and magazines (that hold cartridges…) that can be owned, though he is “pro hunting.” Petersen Group, which Hindery bought years ago, was also just a publisher chasing market niches playing to car and gun aficionados. Life.

      The NRA has done a lot to protect gun owners, but lately SAF and others have been more effective in the courts. A rich ecosystem of pro-gun-rights organizations benefits us all, and small donations to each seem like a better route than big donations to any one group, like “life memberships” which say, economically, “you don’t have to keep me happy anymore…” And yes, I know the Board voting rules.

  3. That is about as low as you can go. Complete exploitation of those kids and their families. And they have the gall to accuse the firearms industry of exploitation?

    I’m still wondering about the “high-powered magazine”, and the truthfulness of the statement that 11 kids escaped in the time it took him to reload. Does that mean he was slow at reloading, the kids were quick, or they simply weren’t in his field of view at the time? Or is it complete BS? How would they know?

    Excuse me while I go throw up.

    • I think you take the number of kids who were in a 5 mile radius, that weren’t injured in some way during the time 30 minutes before and after an incident, divided by the number of reloads and add the square root of the temperature at the airport in Tampa at the time and you get your answer.

  4. Unfortunately all the antis have is to wave the Bloody shirt.
    To try and play on peoples emotions.
    Otherwise they haven’t a leg to legitimately stand on.
    Nothing they say has anything to back it up or more importantly.
    None of what they ever propose will stop a criminal from preforming his/her dastardly acts on others.
    Except a good person with a gun.

    • Only because not enough people call them out for the vile haters they are for accusing us of not caring about dead children just because we disagree on policy proscriptions for preventing mass shootings.

      They have no proof that we hate children or don’t care that children got killed. Yet we, by and large, allow them to say that to us over and over and over. The only person I have seen call the Left out on that is Ben Shapiro, on his appearance on Piers Morgan.

  5. “If civilian disarmament advocates made that leap they might devise a new and possibly more effective strategy for their assault on gun rights.”

    Can anyone conceive of a scenario where that “more effective strategy” does not include state-sanctioned profiling, discrimination, repression – essentially an apartheid situation?

    • Yes. Putting on my gun controller hat:

      “We cannot match the NRA’s funding. The blood in the streets never comes true. Our legislation dies in committee. So let us direct our efforts to smaller targets. We go after individuals. Start the opposition research on Chris Cox, LaPierre and Noir. Find something. A messy divorce. Bank liens. A racist Facebook post. Find something! We’ll put out a press release exposing their dirty laundry and anyone donating to these organizations is complicit in their… whatever we find. If owning guns isn’t enough to get people to stay the hell away from these people, then they should know of the other reasons to stay away from these people.

      Personnel is policy. Let’s make them hate the personnel. Then they will hate the policy.”

  6. Perhaps a video could be made showing pictures of children killed in auto accidents and juxtaposing them with quotes from car manufacturers, since many times as many children die in car accidents than from firearms. They are inherently dangerous and should be regulated out of existence, right?

    • Likewise swimming pools. And besides, swimming pools are just an affectation of the rich, right? Those filthy one-percenters….

    • We don’t want to roll around in the mud with them, we want to stand up with our heads held high and make sure everyone else in the room sees how disgusting they are for rolling around in the mud the way they do.

  7. Gunhaters really have no concept of America. They hoped to exploit Newtown the way British socialists exploited Dunblane, and they fell flat. Why? Because we’re not British socialists, and the left just doesn’t get that and never will.

    The thought of a madman loose in a school with a rifle is frightening to soccer moms everywhere. To men, the thought of a government with a monopoly on guns is even more frightening.

    • A madman loose with a rifle is a scary thought. The question is, what to do. The anti-gun reaction is essentially denial, to try to engineer a societal solution with intrusive controls and restrictions to make the bad thing impossible. Unfortunately, making bad things impossible is itself impossible and when it fails it’s time for more controls and restrictions.

      The pro-gun reaction is to acknowledge bad people do bad things and the solution is to allow good people to do good things. Had the first people the killer at Sandy Hook encountered been armed, had there been someone like Deputy Englert or an armed teacher or staff member, there would have been many fewer deaths, quite likely no children hurt at all. But that’s not allowed, so what happened happened.

    • “To men, the thought of a government with a monopoly on guns is even more frightening”
      Ralph, it’s pretty damn frightening to women who own our own guns too, of which I am one of many, Guns,not a gender thing, it’s an everyone thing. I think it is safe to say government monopoly is frightening to all gun owners. BTW, I know a number of soccer moms who own guns.

  8. Did you catch the “in the time he took to reload, 11 children escaped” bit? That’s a new one. From what I understood, he reloaded multiple times, and halfway through magazines.

    • It’s not exactly “new” but you mention something that should be highlighted: Adam Lanza reloaded not once but several times (not sure of the exact figure but at least 4 times while firing 154 rounds from a stolen AR15), not just once as implied. The gun control lobby doesn’t mention this since it makes the significance of a single pause in his attack irrelevant and lends more support for the following:

      At least 4 times during the attack, an armed parent/teacher/SRO should have stopped him, however they were all forbidden by state and federal law from defending themselves or the schoolchildren. Their government, instead, gave them a choice of attempting to outrun a bullet which chronos at 3000fps from the muzzle, or hide from their attacker in a facility designed to prevent small children from leaving unnoticed.

      • For a couple days, until the story had time to be reworked to the advantage of the official narrative, it was reported the AR-15 was not used, but rather was found in the trunk of his car.

        Ooops, except another car, and not the one Lanza drove to the school. This is uncomfortable, isn’t it? Imagine how uncomfortable it was to the purveyors of the Official Story. There exist a helicopter video, taken after dark, or police or deputies (hard to tell which, from the overhead angle) removing an AR from a car trunk. Or a shotgun, again, hard to tell which one it was, from a car trunk.

        Indeed, initial reports mentioned only a handgun was used.

        Messy, Bessie.

        • I still want to know what was used. Has it been reported correctly yet? Was it the AR? Or was it a handgun? Or was it both? If you Google it, there are way too many conflicting reports to know what’s the truth.

        • Who knows? It’s likely we will never know. No one was allowed to photograph the interior of the school, and they removed it from the face of the Earth.

          A researcher called various CT entities, including the State Police, asking the name of the company that did the clean-up of all the blood and gore. It should be public information, and there are not that many companies who do that kind of work, on that scale. No one knew!

          NO ONE KNEW! No one knew who might know! *Could it be that it’s because there was nothing to clean up?* I’m asked a question, not making a statement. I’m working with the facts, scare as they are, and asking a simple question.

  9. The antis are using the same tactics that the smoking Nazis used to demonize the tobacco industry. Its based on the belief that you are incapable of making your own decisions and that you are essentially a empty shell vulnerable to manipulation by “evil” corporations. These proponents have no understanding of market forces or demand.

    • Well, in some ways they do understand some basic market principles. Raise prices and demand falls, as they did with taxes on cigarettes. That’s why they do everything they can to make guns and ammo more difficult and expensive to obtain. Yet, they will raise income taxes through the roof and (with a straight face) suggest that it will lead to increases in productive economic activity. But the left never were much on consistency (except to the principle that anything that advances authoritarian socialism is good).

      • Inconsistency is actually a hallmark of left-liberalism: AIDS is so dangerous it will wipe us all out in two generations if we don’t empty all our pockets to fund research. But don’t worry if the school lets HIV positive kids play contact sports like football and lacrosse, it’s actually pretty hard to infect someone. Sarah Palin didn’t have enough governmental experience to qualify as a Vice President. Barack Obama had plenty of governmental experience to be more than qualified as President (or, in the alternative, his lack of executive experience actually made him more qualified than anyone else). A 26-year old gangbanger who gets shot in a turf war is a “child”, victimized by the –well, the “gun lobby”. A 14-year old girl , ahhh, “ushered” into an abortuary by her 26-year-old “boyfriend” is an adult making a responsible decision for herself. It goes on and on.

        • i dont think ive ever seen so many accurate statements in one post on the internet before. thats the shit people GENUINELY do and believe. nobody bothers to think about things and do their own research. if they did, they would know that a working aids preventative is in development (HIV infected do not develop full blown AIDS later on) and a key factor was studying crocodiles and alligators (both of whom have immune systems that kill HIV)

          critical thinking? whats that?

        • That’s because HIV is NEVER present in the body in nearly sufficient numbers to cause a full-blown case of AIDS. And AIDS is not a disease, but a complex of various syndromes. “Finding” HIV was a money bonanza for the guy that “discovered” it, but it’s obvious that there is no single cause for AIDS. It’s an assault on the immune system by a number of factors. Medicine has never found an AIDS victim that had a large count of HIV in their system.

          If present at all in AIDS cases, HIV infections are of very low incidence in the body. Certainly not enough to cause a life-threatening problem.

        • HUH? BTW, Hoss, I was basically quoting former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala regarding AIDS–so blame her if the statements are “inaccurate” (actually, my point was that the statements are contradictory, but you seem to have missed that. But thanks for bringing crocodiles into the discussion, that was most enlightening).

        • In all fairness, I haven’t heard anyone bring up AIDS in many years. It’s no longer the “progressive” cause celebré. Nor is the totally hoaxed KONY 2012.

          Neither is trendy anymore. What’s trendy is Evil Guns and Climate Change. As if climate is something that never changes. If it never had changed, there wouldn’t even be a term for it.

        • Robert, I’ve noticed these inconsistencies as well. I’ve also noticed that convincing lefties to spot these inconsistencies is difficult, especially when you hit the hot-button issues like you do in your post.

          If I may, I would like to suggest a… starter factoid. One with less controversial topics to ease them into the mindset. Just one more tool in the toolbox.

          Lefties are the same people who tell us we must subsidize the price of hybrid cars so that more people will buy hybrid cars. They will also tell us we must increase welfare payments to single mothers in order to prevent them from having more children.

          It is to wonder.

  10. They are making their own rope to hang themselves with. We may lose a few battles in places that weren’t exactly gun friendly to begin with, but their logic is so full of holes, it falls under the “it will sort itself out eventually” category.
    It’s like communism: it looks REALLY DAMN GREAT in paper, but is an absolute clusterfvck in execution. We will win the war, ladies and gents. It’s only a matter of continuing to stay United in our message and playing the waiting game with a big ass bag of popcorn and watch the Obama-Biden Co. Hang itself out to dry.

  11. Gun lobby is pure fiction and the anti-gun folks know it.

    You want scary corporate monsters? Try Monsanto or the car / oil lobby.

    • Or big labor unions. Basically any entity that increases it’s power or market share through coercive regulation instead of free competition.

    • Gun lobby is not pure fiction, let’s at least be honest about it here. It is a VERY real thing and the “gun lobby” does most of its work through the NRA and the NSSF. I have no problems with it, but we don’t have to play games and delude ourselves about what’s going on here.

      Each side has their lobbyists and special interest groups and PACs and campaign fund raising arms.

      Just the way it is.

    • It’s telling, isn’t it, that Shannon Watts was a Monsanto lobbyist before she got her reassignment papers… I mean orders.

      • I didn’t know this. As someone with traditional small-scale farming in his life, this just took my distaste for her to a whole new level.

        “For three years Shannon Troughton/ Shannon Watts was the Director of Global Public and Corporate Affairs for none other than Monsanto. She did her bit defending Genetically engineered crops, fought labeling of genetically engineered products and defended the company’s lawsuits against farmers.” —gunfreezone.net (confirmed on Shannon Watts’ LinkedIn profile)

        So not only is this woman not an “average mom on a mission”, she’s a seasoned professional spin doctor with decades of experience who for years represented one of the most despicable, immoral corporations on planet Earth. I already had no respect for this woman, but this makes it personal and takes my disdain intense. I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t even care whether guns are available or not. If she’d work to try to make it illegal for famers to keep their own seeds, exploiting every anti-competitive, underhanded trick in the book to make life difficult for independent farmers, she’ll do anything. It’s so hard to be a traditional farmer. I’m talking homesteaders and family farms. They don’t have lobbyists like big agribusiness does, and so all the laws are designed to put small farmers out of business to squeeze a few more bucks into the coffers of Monsanto and other dominant agricultural and food corporations. We’re not allowed to sell milk or slaughter our own animals, they’ve made it cost-prohibitive for small operations. Heck, famed Virginia farmer (and pro-freedom, firearm-friendly libertarian!) Joel Salatin wrote a book called Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. No surprise to see Shannon Watts is using the same dirty tricks now that she honed working to destroy the traditional American small farm. She fought labeling food, to stop introducing facts to the public to let them make an informed decision. Same shit now, just misdirect over and over as she damages our country. She’s a public enemy.

        • Yep.

          I live out on the West Coast, and small farmers in WA / OR / CA have been dealing with Monsanto’s sheniangans for years. It’s no accident Watt used to work for them, and now is a basically a paid shill for plutocrat Bloomberg.

          People need to wise up and figure out that MDA is NOT the friend of the American people.

        • When I called Miz Watts a “lobbyist” for Monsanto, it was quite an understatement, wasn’t it?

        • Yes, she is. And thank you for toughing it out as a small-scale, independent farmer! Believe me, I know it can’t be easy. We need a lot more farmers like you, and tell Agribusiness to take a long hike.

  13. Perhaps you could start the ball rolling by stopping the demonization of the left. This conflict is ready for one side to start acting like the grownup and stop throwing stones. Every time you bring in political non-gun topics (race, gays, domestic violence, etc), you just present more targets for ridicule.

    • Every time you bring in political non-gun topics (race, gays, domestic violence, etc), you just present more targets for ridicule.

      Thanks for your concern, tr0ll. I just checked — the person who just raised race, gays, domestic violence etc. was you.

    • What is often called the “right” are basically Americans. Those who still believe in the basic principles on which this country was founded. We are under attack by the “left,” the Progressives, who want to change our country into something entirely different. It’s not like two city-states fighting over territory both claim, where some agreement can be reached. It’s more like one city laying siege to the other. It’s not up Americans to end this. All Americans can do is defeat the Progressives or be wiped out.

      • Where they heck did all these Liberals suddenly crawl out from under rocks and start posting here? It used to be such a nice place to discuss events of the day. Now we have the incessant buzzing in the background …

        anyone? anyone?

        • I take it as an encouraging sign that TTAG is doing the right thing, Mina. If we weren’t doing the right thing so effectively, they wouldn’t be here.

          What I’m saying is that it’s an encouraging sign, not a discouraging one.

          If we weren’t being so successful, they wouldn’t have bothered with us.

        • I’m not going to say any more about it now, but it hasn’t escaped my attention that suddenly, there are a bunch of “strangers in town”. ;D

  14. “Liberty, of a person to own a high-powered magazine, is second to the right of my son to his life.”
    – David Wheeler, father of Ben

    “The right of a black or Hispanic male to travel through New York City without being searched by the police is second to my right to be free from crime.”

  15. “Liberty, of a person to own a high-powered magazine, is second to the right of my son to his life.”
    – David Wheeler, father of Ben

    “The right of a Muslim to travel on an airplane is second to my right to life.”

  16. You see this AR15?

    I built it myself. It’s now a family heirloom, one that I can pass down to my child and he to his.

    I take him shooting in the field next to the river. I let him help me clean my guns and teach him how to safety check them. I taught him the Four Rules and always remind him if he makes a mistake. He’s making fewer and fewer.

    He sees people railing against the NRA and the powerful gun lobby, saying that they want guns everywhere and don’t care about children. He sees how those people seem to hate the gun lobby.

    He turns to me and asks, “Dad, who’s the gun lobby?”

    I respond, “We are, son.”

    “But, Dad, we aren’t anything like what those people say.”

    I swear, my son is smarter than some adults.

    *Disclaimer: I don’t have children. But it it would make a pretty good TV spot. I’ll even narrate for free.

  17. “Liberty, of a person to own a high-powered magazine, is second to the right of my son to his life.”
    – David Wheeler, father of Ben

    “The right to privacy is second to Americans’ right to be safe from terrorism”

  18. The anti-rights types will never understand the power of a physical icon.

    They talk about their cause (an abstract idea) and can’t understand why they can’t maintain interest and momentum (because the same low-information voters that buy their fear-mongering are the same short-attention-span-theater folks who can’t stay focused on something so abstract.

    On the other hand, gun owners have real, tangible, goods (firearms) in their hands. Items they paid good money to own, and they see a very real and tangible connection between that physical item and the political attempts to steal it along with the related Rights.

    When you try to keep groups focused on abstract ideas or tangible physical items, the physical items group is -always- going to have more staying power because the physical item acts as a reminder.

    • Here’s something else that’s tangible: We can add up the number of real live human beings who have been saved by a gun. Defensive gun use is a tangible demonstration of the value of gun rights. We can count those people using actual numbers.

      Ask a gun control person to count up the number of people saved by banning a magazine size or a type of firearm. Crickets.

        • Of course! so when they say: “If it saves only one child!!…” we can say “well, ‘it’ did and ‘it’ did save that child just last week in New Mexico (reference news story) … so ‘it’ must be a gun!!”

    • I grew up in a conservative rural family. We had guns for hunting and did some target practice, but only a couple handguns, one of which was a war capture that my grandfather brought back from WWII. I remember hearing the “if you can’t hunt with it, you don’t need it” line a couple times.

      Being in the military is what really cemented the necessity of the RKBA in my mind. I was exposed to true military issue firearms and I learned how good people can use them to protect the things they love. Since then, my commitment to self-loading rifles and standard capacity magazines (which are as close as I can get to a military rifle) has become absolute. The people who are trying to restrict firearms, especially those firearms, are trying to strip us of the best tools we have available to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

      So I guess you’re right. They’re trying to replace something tangible with cheap words and promises that everything will be OK. But they’re also attacking the security that comes from those tangible things.

      • When it comes to those people, if they don’t want me to have something, it becomes an obsession with me to get some of them.

        • They tell you you can’t have it, and you reply with:

          1. Where can I find one?
          2. Where do I pay?

  19. “Liberty, of a person to own a high-powered magazine, is second to the right of my son to his life.”
    – David Wheeler, father of Ben

    “The right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy is seocnd to the right of her unborn child to his life.”

      • Paul do you even read comments before you post your inane ramblings?

        N.T. said Childs right to life > Women’s right to abortion.

        Unless you Lutherans went all baby killer you should shut your cake hole. And you shouldn’t be handling out troll awards since you are the biggest troll at TTAG.

  21. It’s a typical ploy for the… ahem… intellectually challenged. You gotta give them something on which to focus their hate.

  22. 2A supporters do themselves no favors when they demonize Obama with hyperbole, damn gay marriage, and ridicule Democrats.

    • The left doesn’t need to be framed as demons they are the demons.

      If you’re a democrat, you’re a Liberal and you are the enemy. period.

        • There are a lot of angry, hysterically frightened, arrogant, self-important people on the fringe left who have hi-jacked the meaning of the word “liberal.” They function with the mistaken belief that if they can just grab control of the government and use it to control everything and everyone they’re not comfortable with, we’ll all be better off.

          Still, the far left doesn’t have a monopoly on these types – the far right has plenty of them too.

        • Exactly my point. The real “liberal” is the Jeffersonian principles. Not a bunch of statist control freaks.

    • Democrats do no favors by attempting to legislate away the America they don’t like and demonize perfectly moral god loving people. ANY man who willingly chooses and desires to lord over other men, is how all this bullshit started in the first place.

      I dont care what your politics are, as long as you want to leave me right the fvck alone to enjoy the constitution(and my unalienable rights) as intended.

    • I don’t need to use hyperbole to demonize Obama; he provides plenty of material himself. And I’m still waiting on someone to name me some real 2-A supporting Democrat national office holders, who actually use their positions to support the 2nd when they are “on the job” and not just “on the campaign”. (If someone has, I apologize, I have missed it).

  23. Really Mediocrates? What makes you intellectually superior? And Rogalin it’s not hard to demonize Obama or democrats when they try to destroy my country. Favor? Stop trolling.

      • An IQ of 130 is not quite two standard deviations above the mean. An IQ above 146 begins to enter noteworthy territory, in my selfish opinion.

        It doesn’t really matter how quickly a person thinks, but rather how well they think, even if they reach their conclusions slowly. Put another way, good software run on ordinary hardware still beats good hardware loaded with buggy software.

    • I may be wrong, but I think Mediocrates is talking about anti-gun goo-goos needing something to hate, so they hate guns. If that is correct, I would say he may be on to something. I might change it to “something to blame”; won’t do to blame Adam Lanza for Newtown, for example, he’s dead. So the more feelings-driven folks are led to blame/hate guns. I trust Mediocrates will correct me if I read him wrong.

      • It’s so much more basic I am shocked you guys always miss it.

        The war is not the guns, the war is masculinity in general.

        Guns just happen to be a very obvious and convenient symbol of masculinity, they make a great target.

        Believe me if they thought they could snap off your cojones and put them in a jar, they’d do that first. Then they’d take your guns. But at that point, you’d not fight back. See?

  24. Isn’t it time to put children before profits??? That is fine by me – but I will not put my children before the freedom of everyone else’s children. Their proposed solution isn’t a solution regardless.

  25. Antis will alwsys lose there is no bases of truth in there pathetic arguments.They use underhanded tactics , lies,
    mistruths, eliteisms, crooked law passing agendas and end justifies the means type policies.

  26. These treasonist radicals refuse to go after criminals and gang bangers cause they shootback instead they disarm law abiding citizens cause they won’t…..YET!

  27. Talk about lack of context, dancing on graves, and lack of intellectual honesty. Put together a video of all the children who sleep sounder tonight after their mothers and fathers defending them from home intruders, violent rapists and molesters…. you’re almost hearing of a DGU in Detroit daily these days. Those children are alive BECAUSE of firearms. Whoever put that video together has a special place in hell waiting for them.

    • Thank you!! We had an incident recently in our neighborhood causing us to strap on our handguns, close all of the blinds and turn off all of the lights.

      without getting into the gory details, my scared to death 13you son was asked by his Dad: “you know sometimes we make fun of Mommy and her blind enthusiasm with her hobbies. But she made sure when something happens like this, if it goes bad, that we can protect ourselves. would you rather be sitting here scared having no way protect ourselves or be aware of what’s happening around us and prepared?”

      Through his tears and fear came the answer: “Prepared.”

      Damn straight. Me too!!

  28. Hey Mediocrates obviously you do care. EVERY belief I have is carefully considered. Claiming on the internet you have a high IQ does NOT make it so. Most people posting do so anonymously. Like YOU or me. Quit being an “interwebz” troll.

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