By Jeff W. Zimba
We will always have the upper hand in the battle of gun rights for one simple reason; We have the facts on our side.
Those who are opposed to firearms ownership or even further restriction on firearms often make uneducated decisions in this field. Their emotions often rule their decision making process and debating them is a fairly easy task when you learn how they think.
I tend to classify anti-gunners into three categories. Some of them are not necessarily bad people, just folks who have no experience with firearms or have had firearms touch their lives in a less than pleasant way. Some are misled by the propaganda thrown at them by anti-gun hate groups like Sarah Brady’s Handgun Control, Inc (recently renamed The Brady Project) and have just never thought about it beyond the lies. They feel safer believing that there are no firearms in close proximity because of the lies they have heard. Others are those who know exactly what they are doing and simply perpetuate lies and deceit to attain their goal of total civilian disarmament. As long as we keep the facts on our side we can always win a war of wits with anyone listed above.
Lies and tall tales are tough to battle because anyone can make a statement, false or not, and if the person is somewhat believable in their presentation anything can be passed or sold as a fact. Most people will never look into it and just believe the first thing they heard. It is when we can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that their first source was wrong or even intentionally lying, the wolf starts to become apparent from beneath the sheep’s clothing.
Once it has been established that someone you once believed and trusted has led you the wrong way, future things they say will come under immediate scrutiny and their credibility will dissolve fast.
The reason that the anti-gun groups are able to spread deceit so easily, and mislead so many otherwise intelligent people is due to the lack firearms education in our more populated areas. It is easy to make up about a story about a subject your audience knows nothing about and pass it off as believable. It is when you try and convince someone with an education on the subject you are speaking about that lies are obvious. Imagine telling a firearms enthusiast that a 9mm ball round will penetrate 1” of steel. They will look at you like you have three eyes. Now tell that same story to someone who doesn’t shoot and they will probably say “Wow! What does anyone need something like that for?” I think you can see my point.
This is something we need to watch very closely among our own ranks as well. There are a few statements I hear coming from our own pro-gun side occasionally that are not truthful either. Most of them simply started as urban legends and once repeated enough just become common statements. As we actually have truth and honest fact on our side, it is very important not get some of these urban legends mixed in and allow the anti-gunners to use them to discredit us.
This leads us to my website pick of the month. http://www.guncite.com is an excellent website to educate people about the Second Amendment. They have several pages from their main page dealing with every aspect of firearms ownership you could possibly imagine. The site is full of facts, gun laws, constitutional explanations, case law, definitions, statistics and even links to pro-gun and anti-gun websites. One area of the site I found particular interesting was the section regarding bogus gun control quotes. You can find it direct at http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcbogus.html or follow the link there from the main page. There you will find a few quotes that never existed, and a few items we have been told were true in the past. Make sure you look these up and remove them from your pro-gun debates. You will be pleased to find that there are hundreds of reinforcements to our side of the debate at this site and only a few we need to stop using.
If you think you know of a website the readers of Small Arms Review would be interested in learning about, you can e-mail me directly at: Production@wtvl.net
-Jeff
| This article first appeared in Small Arms Review V5N2 (November 2001) |
