Gun Control Playbook

[wil]

From what the Jewish people have been through, I would have thought that almost nobody in the community would ever allow themselves to be disarmed again.

True although the very same failure of human nature, or character, that allowed that to happen to them back then, are the very same failures happening now. JPFO probably comprises the percentage of individuals who have the moral courage to see the truth of things, the rest engage in the same failure of moral courage that brought it on the first time around.

[The Annoyed Man]

Quoting the guide directly:

OVERALL MESSAGING GUIDANCE

• 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.
    • It’s critical that you ground your messaging around gun violence prevention by making that
      emotional connection. Don’t skip past emotional arguments and lapse into a passionless public
      policy voice. And don’t make the gun violence debate seem as if it is a political “food fight” between
      two interest groups.
      
      There is a reason why the NRA falls silent at times of high-profile gun violence incidents. The last
      thing they want is an American conversation centered on the terrible toll that gun violence takes on
      people’s lives.
  • #2: TELL STORIES WITH IMAGES AND FEELINGS.
    • Our first task is to draw a vivid portrait and make an emotional connection. We should rely on
      emotionally powerful language, feelings and images to bring home the terrible impact of gun violence.
      Compelling facts should be used to back up that emotional narrative, not as a substitute for it.
      WARNING: Don’t break the power and undermine the value of emotionally powerful images and
      feelings by appearing squeamish or apologetic in presenting them.

Nice of them to make our argument for us.

Never let facts get in your way. There is something absolutely morally and intellectually bankrupt about a political philosophy which seeks deliberately bury true facts.

[rbwhatever1]

Good information in the playbook. Thanks for posting, I've scattered it about the country!

Cheers

[bdickens]

Quoting the guide directly:

OVERALL MESSAGING GUIDANCE

• 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.
    • It’s critical that you ground your messaging around gun violence prevention by making that
      emotional connection. Don’t skip past emotional arguments and lapse into a passionless public
      policy voice. And don’t make the gun violence debate seem as if it is a political “food fight” between
      two interest groups.
      
      There is a reason why the NRA falls silent at times of high-profile gun violence incidents. The last
      thing they want is an American conversation centered on the terrible toll that gun violence takes on
      people’s lives.
  • #2: TELL STORIES WITH IMAGES AND FEELINGS.
    • Our first task is to draw a vivid portrait and make an emotional connection. We should rely on
      emotionally powerful language, feelings and images to bring home the terrible impact of gun violence.
      Compelling facts should be used to back up that emotional narrative, not as a substitute for it.
      WARNING: Don’t break the power and undermine the value of emotionally powerful images and
      feelings by appearing squeamish or apologetic in presenting them.

Nice of them to make our argument for us.

Never let facts get in your way. There is something absolutely morally and intellectually bankrupt about a political philosophy which seeks deliberately bury true facts.

That's why they win.

[VMI77]

I'm not at all surprised. The American Jewish community has been extremely liberal for a very long time.

It is obvious that there is a oddly large number of Jewish people in the anti-gun movement. Though if you look deep enough, you will see that the Jewish community seem to be in full favor of a well armed government

Because it worked out so well for them in the 1930s and '40s.

Somehow, I don't think the Nazis could have killed six million of them if every time the Gestapo came knocking on the Goldstein's door they were met with a shotgun blast instead of meek compliance.

This man wasn't talking about the Nazis but about Stalin's NKVD, though the sentiment is appropriate:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

NEVER think for a minute that the large numbers of firearms in the hands of private American citizens don't contribute greatly to preserving at least some freedom in the USA. To try the things that the Soviets did, here in the USA against our armed populace, would be a potential suicide mission for many of those who would be tasked to do so.

God Bless the Founding Fathers.

He also says somewhere that those being rounded up to be killed were so passive that the "authorities" took to sending out just one militiaman to round up 30 or 40 victims. So, I"m not so sure the outcome would have been the same there as it would be here. The population had been conditioned as serfs for centuries and may have shared a degree of fatalism that extinguished the instinct for self-defense. We still have some remnants of a culture that extolled individualism and the right to self-defense. There are no doubt many Americans who will not go gently into that goodnight. Even so, I imagine that if the same thing happened here there are many who would go to their deaths as passively as those Russian serfs.