I’d like to recommend a little light reading for your weekend, and it won’t cost you a cent. It’s Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging, a downloadable 84-page book containing almost all the strategies and tactics employed by the gun control gang.
One thing you will notice is that the Second Amendment gets very little mention, and what it does get is almost entirely about Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller. McDonald v. City of Chicago gets a brief mention, too.
This isn’t surprising: Knowledgeable gun-control fans know there’s nothing they can do about the Second Amendment itself. The process described in Article V of the U.S. Constitution and the fact that the gun-grabbers would have to persuade 38 states to ratify a new amendment is a barrier to the hopes of all but the most optimistic gun control Pollyannas.
The book came out in 2012, so there’s no mention of Bruen or Rahimi. It was also when the National Rifle Association was riding high and membership was peaking. As you might expect, the NRA is the principal villain in this book, sort of like the Death Star in Star Wars or Godzilla.
The book’s emphasis on emotional appeals as propaganda displays a quite unflattering cynicism. They’re shedding crocodile tears while standing on the bodies of the slain, demanding laws that wouldn’t have saved them.
The books authors emphasize avoidance of “(t)he political food fight in Washington or wonky statistics.” That’s almost humorous, considering how “wonky” the statistics used by Everytown and Giffords really are.
Gun control is all about using weaponized language and well-cooked statistics to create bogeymen and alarm the public. It depends on inventing terms like “assault weapon” and “gun violence” and using public ignorance and a very cooperative mainstream media to peddle them.
Sources like the Gun Violence Archive inflate the number of mass shootings: So far in 2025, the GVA claims there have been 124 mass shootings in the U.S. while the Violence Prevention Project, which has a far more exhaustively researched database, reports no mass shootings since September last year.
But which number, 124 or zero, is more likely to be on the evening news?
It’s just like the exaggerations in the K-12 School Shooting Database I mentioned in a previous article.
In his classic 1984, George Orwell wrote: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
It’s called the Big Lie. Adolf Hitler also wrote about it in Mein Kampf. The idea is if you’re going to lie, make it a big lie; repeat it frequently. Eventually, the public will come to accept the Big Lie.
How effective is this? In February 2019, Marist conducted a poll of 880 adults. The survey was commissioned by NPR and PBS and covered ‘popular’ gun control laws.
The results were as one would expect: Big numbers for the gun-grabbers’ agenda.
However, the last question on the survey unintentionally affirmed how well the Big Lie works.
The question was: “From what you have heard or read, do you think, compared to 25 years ago, the per capita gun murder rate in the U.S. is higher, lower, or about the same?”
59% of the survey group said the rate had gone up; 23% said it was about the same.
According to data from the FBI and the CDC, over the 25 years from 1994 to 2018, the murder rate plunged 37 percent.
82% of those responding believed something demonstrably untrue.
Was that ever mentioned in the media coverage of the study? No.
As you read Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging, you will learn an important fact: The gun-control movement doesn’t care about the Second Amendment or the rights it protects. They dismiss it by saying they support it or they’re not coming to take our guns away. They then proceed to ignore it, confident the public will agree.
What this means is we’re fighting the wrong battle. The Second Amendment doesn’t need defending; it’s secure and even the zealots in the gun control movement realize this.
General George S. Patton once said: “No one ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”
That’s good advice. We should heed it. Instead of being on the defensive, we need to “attack and attack and attack some more.” Our target is gun control’s Big Lies, the biggest of which is the claim gun control laws save lives, even though there isn’t any statistical evidence to support that claim.
This battle is going to be tough, but we must win it by discrediting gun control; by exposing their Big Lies and destroying their stereotypes of gun owners.
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago and has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
There are 23,000+ gun control laws, yet murders still occur…not a single one is effective, and any claim their newest laws will reduce violence is proof current laws don’t work. In fact, we have about the same annual murder by firearm we did in 1934, yet we have added about 200,000,000 people and 300,000,000 guns. Proportionately murder is way down despite an explosion in number of guns owned.
“This battle is going to be tough, but we must win it by discrediting gun control; by exposing their Big Lies and destroying their stereotypes of gun owners.”
Very good information. Your analysis shows that we need to be represented on the Second Amendment Task Force, more than ever. If level heads from ALL stakeholders could get in the same room, we could settle a lot of this nonsense. /2cts.
Well done. At the crux of the problem is more than one of the deadly ‘isms’ at work contending against liberty. This is true on many fronts and the attacks come in many forms. For instance, while progressives and other brands of leftists attack ‘gun violence’ as a key mortality means affecting children they are blind to the primary source of violence against children: abortion. You se, eugenics is a foundational principle in progressive ideology. So child lives matter only when they can be invoked to advance a greater cause and that cause is the suppression of Natural Law based… Read more »
love it. logic vs emotion battle royale.
how can you be safe in your home(s) and neighborhoods without firearms? without them you are at the mercy of people without mercy, criminals and government(s).
those pesky do’s and don’ts. do mislead the public, don’t tell them the truth.
4 keys; who commits those acts of violence? emotions are good to have, but you shouldn’t let them rule your life. images of governments killing their own citizens are not good to show.
this is all propaganda at best and in reality boldfaced lies.
Facts are refuted by outlandish falsehoods for emotional response. If there is enough emotional outrage in support of their agenda then they can pass “laws” (unconstitutional), elect local and state judges to support these “laws”, elect federal legislators to pass self same “laws” for the country, elect an executive branch who will support it and nominate like minded justices to SCOTUS who will opine that these “laws” are not unconstitutional and the rights guaranteed protection under the 2A will vanish. This isn’t hyperbole, this is exactly what is happening and how states like WA, OR, CO are passing blatantly unconstitutional… Read more »
Right now there are very large numbers of traditional democrat voters who KNOW that their formerly trusted media has been lying to them, and they are not at all happy about it. PROOF: Look up the hard viewership numbers for *enemedia outlets like MSNBC and CNN. Refuse to be fooled by any references to percentages and look up the hard viewership numbers, normally given as estimated totals for any given hour. In a nation of some 350 million people (counting illegals) neither MSNBC nor CNN can attract even one (1) whole million anymore during most of their hours outside of… Read more »
In the world we live in today, so many people have grown up believing that they know what’s best. The intellectual types have learned from their educators the firearms are the devil. They have been taught that the only way to fix our problems is to eliminate the United States of all guns.Now those same intellectuals are the ones running our government. These people tell their voters that the horrors of gun violence can only be stopped by taking away the 2nd Amendment. They play off the tragedies of school shooting gs to scare voters to believing that their children… Read more »
Propaganda must be rooted in a preponderance of truth lest it become comedy. Soviet and Cuban ‘news’ broadcasts during the Cold War became comedic because of their detachment from truth. The same is happening to major media outlets like the NYT, MSDNC and CNN. Alternatives are out there. I recommend to all of my friends they cut the cable and get a Roku device and get engaged with alternative media. You will find far better, more competent and more sourced coverage from the major religious broadcast networks like Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN), Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) and Victory. There are… Read more »
This is right out of the demarxist playbook. Follow Alinsky’s 12 Rules for Radicals & they’ll win the narrative every time. In this case they’re focusing on two rules. #2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people”. #3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy”. Possibly #4 (Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules) & #5 (Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon) as well. The longer they spew the lie/false narrative to an uneducated populace the longer it becomes true. Folks nowadays barely have enough time to focus on living much less researching… Read more »