Author: Sebastian

Higher than both the media and Congress. There was a concerted effort from NRA during the 90s to enter the mainstream, and by virtue of that, bring the issue with it. Clinton, and George H.W. Bush before him,  were very successful in the late 1980s and early 1990s at painting NRA as a whack job of an organization. From “jackbooted thugs”, to laying the blame for Oklahoma City square at the feet of extremist gun rights supporters, it was one blow after another. A lot of the gains we’ve made since have been the result of gun rights becoming credible a mainstream issue, and taking action to attempt to blunt the media assertions. That’s one reason NRA promoted a popular idea of putting armed police or security in schools; it’s a mainstream alternative to gun control, and it’s mainstream in a way that “arming teachers” is not yet.

The media and the anti-gun groups spend so much time demonizing NRA because they know they need to force it out of the mainstream and to the fringe. This has gotten to be much more difficult for them because there are plenty of new outlets people can turn to in order to not feel alone. Alienation and shame are the primary weapons our opponents have to affect a successful divide and conquer strategy. The media campaigns to smear NRA are largely intended to shame marginal gun owners into not associating it, or its opinions. The media and anti-gun groups openly tout other gun owners with pro-gun control attitudes, because they want to offer marginal gun owners an identity outside of gun rights movement, and offer those people acceptance from polite society (for the time being).

I think blogs, forums, social media, etc in our community offer those marginal gun owners a place to find other similarly minded people. I’m personally quite comfortable being on a fringe, but most people are not; they want to belong, and shame can be a powerful weapon in convincing people they are alienated, and not accepted by mainstream society. If it did not work, our opponents would not employ this tactic in such a heavy handed manner. NRA has always had the burden of having to defend gun rights, but having to do so while not fighting and arguing too far ahead of where the culture currently is.  In any political battle, you need to be able to form a large enough coalition to get the attention of policy makers, and not every member of that coalition is going to be someone engaged in this issue on an constant and ongoing basis.

When I first started reading this article at CNN, I thought it was a joke; a sort of a tongue in cheek call to Bloomberg to put his money and reputation where his mouth is. But no, this is a serious article suggesting that Bloomberg and all the other billionaires (who have their own armed security) for gun control buy up The Freedom Group and essentially neuter their product line and make it politically correct.

This is honestly how naive these people are. Seriously, I really wish more journalists would at least make a half hearted effort to truly understand the gun culture before pontificating about it. This would result in the utter destruction of the Freedom Group, because, as one of my fellow bloggers mentioned last week during the Cheaper than Dirt blow-up, gun nerds love to knife a traitor more than most other pastimes. This is truth. Any journalist who doubts that can ask Smith & Wesson’s former owners, or even Cooper Arms, whose CEO I attacked back in 2008 when he decided no one had anything to worry about when it came to Obama and guns, and offered his endorsement (How’s that working out now, Dan?). As the link to TFB mentions, they were bought by Wilson back in 2009.

Tactical Tupperware notes:

A few days back I heard an old man share a world view that was so simple it made sense. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard it before.

He said that if I move my fence 100ft onto your property, you protest and then I move it back to only 50ft on your property, to a politician that was compromise but to anybody else its still theft.

That’s pretty much how they think it works. What’s amusing is that they’ve never even given a try at true horse trading. I can’t think of a better way to get gun owners arguing about who to throw off the lifeboat than offering trading gun show loophole for, say, the Hughes Amendment, or taking suppressors out from under the National Firearms Act. Hell, you could probably find takers for putting semi-auto long guns under NFA in exchange for repealing the 86 ban on full-auto. That would be epic divide and conquer, but as I’ve pointed out in the past, there’s a reason horse trading, practically speaking, doesn’t happen except in smoke filled rooms full of politicians and lobbyists.

Heather from Alaska has an good example of how to personally make a difference on the cultural front:

To be entirely honest, there were several times over the past week when I wondered why I was bothering trying to explain my position to people who felt it was okay to just insult me personally based on my beliefs.  I kept at it, though, and very recently I realized how much that work had paid off.

I had received several private comments from people supporting me, which certainly helped some but those were mostly from those who agreed with me to begin with.  Then one of the pro-gun control people made a public post in the forum in my support.  She thought that I was being unfairly attacked.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Being engaged with ordinary people is important. It not only lets you know what people outside the movement think, but also lets other people out there who are on our side, but might not quite be as vocal, know there are other people out there that think the same way. It offers an opportunity to expand the horizontal interpretive community, and to prevent the left’s strategy of shaming the nation into supporting gun control from working.