Anti-gunner’s playbook

Via a Tweet from SAF I found Dave Workman’s article on the Gun Control Playbook.

Looking at the actual playbook there are some interesting things. This is particularly intriguing:

Advocates for gun violence prevention win the logical debate, but lose on more emotional terms.

This is followed by these “Key Messaging Principles”:

#1: ALWAYS FOCUS ON EMOTIONAL AND VALUE-DRIVEN
ARGUMENTS ABOUT GUN VIOLENCE, NOT THE POLITICAL
FOOD FIGHT IN WASHINGTON OR WONKY STATISTICS.

#2: TELL STORIES WITH IMAGES AND FEELINGS.

#3: CLAIM MORAL AUTHORITY AND THE MANTLE OF FREEDOM.

If they “win the logical debate” then why not play on that turf rather than engaging on the emotional battlefield?

Read the playbook. It’s conformation of the things we have been saying for years. They don’t have facts they have emotions. They literally believe that being a victim grants them moral authority:

Many of the most active advocates and voices in the gun violence prevention movement are people who have personally lived through a life-changing gun violence experience. That painful reality gives such spokespeople special moral authority.

If you or a loved one were raped does that give you the moral authority to demand all men be put in jail or neutered? If you or a loved one were destitute does that give you the moral authority to demand others give you their property? If you or a loved one were slandered or libeled does that give you the moral authority the demand “sensible laws to prevent slander and libel” which infringe upon the right to freedom of speech?

The answer is no. And to those that believe they have moral authority because they or a loved one were injured by someone with a gun the answer is also no.

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8 thoughts on “Anti-gunner’s playbook

  1. That stuff is a very minor adaptation from the communist, or communist revolutionary, and islamist revolutionary, playbook. It’s always the same. Foment dissatisfaction, unrest, heightened emotion, fear, a victim mentality, hate, and then the violence flows naturally from your prepped culture. Everyone cries out for something to be done. Then you sweep in to “save” the situation by taking control, destroying your opponents and enslaving everyone else. It’s a constant in human history. The modern description is “Top Down, Bottom Up, Inside Out” but that basic idea has been around since the beginning of time.

  2. The Victim game also lets them call us “Cold” and “Heartless” when we challenge their faulty demands.

    Of course they call us “Cold” and “Heartless” because we simply want effective tools to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

    So yeah, game on!

  3. Seems like a good time to repeat my comment from a few days ago: No one’s pain, grief, fear or desire trumps my rights.

  4. I defer to Michael Bane on this one…

    let’s talk about victims. As Americans, as human beings, our collective hearts bleed for victims, whether from violent crimes or tsunamis or school bus accidents. Because of that compassion, we allow victims a special voice within our culture. We listen to victims because their loss gives special poignancy to their words.

    I was in New York City right after 9-11, and I sat in bars in lower Manhattan and listened to people who had lost friends, relatives, spouses, children. Some of those people called for immediate, bloody reaction in the United States…I just nodded my head and bought the drinks. If you were to ask those same people today whether they still called for detention camps for Muslims and Star Chamber trials, they would be mortified. In fact, I doubt they even remember those words so many years back in dark Manhattan bars.

    Yes, the words of victims have special poignancy, but what they don’t have is any special truth. Grief drives us to look toward the heavens and demand an answer from any nearby Deity. Grief drives us to demand a solution to the fundamental insoluble problem, which is that the world is as it is. Bad things happen, often to good people, and grief drives us to…do something.

    (http://michaelbane.blogspot.com/2013/04/riverdance-with-blood.html)

  5. Pingback: SayUncle » The anti-gun playbook

  6. You cannot have a logical debate and a emotional one at the same time, IMHO.
    That is why most anti-freedom people will never concede an argument with us, because we are literally arguing two different things.
    They are emphatic about why the color yellow makes them sad while we are responding vehemently with an example of measured frequencies of EMR.

  7. If you or a loved one were destitute does that give you the moral authority to demand others give you their property?

    Um, there seems to be a lot of cross-enrollment between the Anti-Gun Crew and people who believe exactly that.

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