Rare View Media group’s PSA below is nothing if not long, so I’ll summarize it for you. Three kids take another kid’s iPhone. The humiliated victim gets a gun and shoots his antagonists. To me, it says more about bad parenting than the “easy availability of guns.” Equally, how often does this scenario actually play out?

Too often. But nowhere near as often as teens shooting themselves, or shooting someone else as part of inter-gang retaliation or turf defense. But emotions are what gun control advocates do. Not facts. Which begs the question, why aren’t pro-gun rights groups making emotional PSA’s?

Oh sure, the NRA puts out masses of Freedom’s Safest Place polemics and similar rational thought-based pro-gun videos (with some flag waving thrown in). But I’ve not seen a single video that really tugs at the heart strings or, to be less charitable, exploits raw human emotion to make the case for armed self-defense.

If anyone knows of a truly effective pro-gun video, please link below. And if anyone wants to create one, TTAG will gladly post it. But let’s start with this: what would an emotion-based pro-gun PSA look like? What would it say?

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31 COMMENTS

    • They should do another PSA where some ‘children’ (teenage gang members) break into a house to rape, pillage and murder only to get mowed down by a homeowner with a scary black rif le, because of the easy availability of g uns.

      • There is a gun store commercial that shows a young girl cowering behind a door as a potential rapist taunts her. It ends with her emptying a Tommy gun into him if I remember correctly followed by a little blurb that says something to the effect of “horror movies would end a lot differently if the victim had a gun”. It appealed to emotion as much as reason. It is often shown in LTC classes here in Texas.

        EDIT: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoR0jF0vuY

        • Awesome. On the other hand, have you ever actually tried to chase a bunch of scantily clad girls in their late teens and early twenties while waving and revving a chain saw? Talk about the mother of all aerobic exercises!

  2. I have for some time considered how we could make our pro freedom, pro self defense arguments using emotion. Clearly the Dragnet style (“Just the facts, ma’am”) and logic based arguments won’t reach those whose thought processes are emotionally based.

    I like the idea of hitting the anti freedom folks over the head with their own style of communication. It just might move a few people away from their anti-gun position to at least a neutral one.  A good start would be some of the “Should have been a DGU” stories or some of the DGU stories that could have turned out poorly if not for the DGU.

  3. “As a survivor of rape, and now a mother to two small children — you know, it seems like being able to purchase a firearm of my choosing, and being able to carry that wherever my — me and my family are — it seems like my basic responsibility as a parent at this point. I have been unspeakably victimized once already, and I refuse to let that happen again to myself or my kids. So why can’t your administration see that these restrictions that you’re putting to make it harder for me to own a gun, or harder for me to take that where I need to be is actually just making my kids and I less safe?” – Kimberly Corban

  6. Should have been a dgu?
    Avoid stupid people in stupid places?
    Isn’t calling someone a thug a racist dog whistle? I thought they were the economically disadvantaged minority.
    Too long winded to be an effective message, and the sjw class “should” pick it apart as it’s laden with stereotypes.
    I’m lost as to how this is supposed to work.

  7. Context.

    This seems to be incorrect usage of force. Not to mention the “victim” transitioned to the aggressor when he went after them. A stolen iPhone does not equate to an imminent threat of bodily harm or death.

    It would be different if they broke into his home and had weapons…

    • 3-1 is really bad odds, I’d say that constitutes a threat. Most use of force incidents end without a shot fired, but walking around buried in a phone is asking for trouble, returning later is an even worse one.

  10. “Which begs the question, why aren’t pro-gun rights groups making emotional PSA’s?”
    But then what would Hollywood do?

    “What would an emotion-based pro-gun PSA look like? What would it say?” Probably a selfless hero finding their courage and a magic sword to take on a vile villain, who is defeated against impossible odds. In the modern era, the sword is going to be a gun that never misses or run out of ammo, though sometimes it’s a macbook that can hack anything. The macbook ones are not nearly as cool.

  11. Well, the setting was fairly accurate. The family values were clearly lacking when a kid is handed a gun already wrapped up in gang colors. And, it appears that the kid had unresolved issues already based on his reaction to the theft of his phone. Kids in the ghetto expect to have things stolen if they walk around flashing them. In fact, the kid was walking around flashing the phone while being totally oblivious to what was going on around him. That isn’t normal in a city environment. Kids learn early what this kid ignored. And this scenario does not play out every day. If the kid had good family conditions, he would have gone to an older brother or parent to fix the situation. This PSA was more about a condition in modern society which needs fixing… the home environment. It’s not the gun. If it were about the weapon, the kid might just as easily have used a baseball bat or hockey stick.

    Unfortunately, the masses will accept this propaganda the way it was intended. They will also accept the phony data without checking it for themselves, which might lead them to realize they are being duped.

    On the other hand, more and more liberals, who are apparently not progressive liberals, including the LBGTs, are arming themselves.

    Perhaps we should be producing PSAs which display the deep roots of the Democrat Party and it’s continued support for slavery from the 1860s to today when they want to economically enslave anyone who does not swallow their ideology.

    • Such PSA’s that demonstrate the history of gun control, done well, could instill the belief in the average person that gun control is racist. In this day and age, being called a racist is almost as feared as public speaking.

  12. I like the PSA’s I see on FOX(from the NRA). But who see’s them? Preaching to the choir as it were. Sorry but a lot of the “right” folks don’t need to be convinced they should be pro-2A…

    • You’d be surprised by the number of Democrats that watch Fox News. In addition, there are plenty of people on the right who don’t know **** about gun control.

      I grew up in a very pro-gun family. My maternal grandfather had a CHL and reloaded (he died well before I was born, but his political beliefs lived on). My paternal grandfather was a hunter. Until I read John Lott’s work, my gun control argument was 2A and criminals don’t follow the law.

      My point is that there is a lot of education that needs to happen.

  13. The best pro-gun PSA I’ve seen was the original John Wick. It shows what happens when you steal a man’s car and kill his puppy. His puppy! You don’t kill a man’s puppy. You just don’t.

    How’s that for tugging the heart strings?

  14. I would say the somewhat humorous Glock commercials. The redhead at home by herself, the guy robbing the diner, those sorts of things. The best thing to do, is to find something liberals, and everyone for that matter, do everyday, and turn it into a bad scenario. Then, you can have a gun guy or gal save the day. It’s pretty simple.

    • The two I remember are:
      1. the Glock “Wrong Girl” ad that you referred to; and,
      2. the knock-off of the Bloomberg PSA of the ex breaking down the door with the mother cowering with her young son. In the knock-off it ends with her presenting her arm and the ex frozen scared-x-less.
      I think we need to focus. It does us no good to depict a tobacco-chewing red-neck complaining he has a right to bear-arms anywhere he likes. The issue is NOT the truth-/false-ness of the assertion; it’s one of effectiveness. Just exactly what message would be effective NOW – in 2017 – for the audience we want to reach?

      My answer to this question is: vulnerable subjects; and, home context. Young mothers; grandparents; physically-limited people. We OFWGs might seem to be better able to take care of ourselves with a tire-iron; so, why should we use ourselves as subjects? Home is a better venue than the street. The prospect of a young-mother, grandparent or handicapped person wielding a gun INSIDE her OWN HOME is far less of a frightening prospect to the viewer than that same individual walking down the street in a commercial or school zone. Why push our message right-in-your-face to our audience? Let’s get the idea across that our subjects should choose whether/or-not they will defend themselves when they are “sitting-ducks” inside the fragile front doors of their “castles”. It is in just this context (homes) where most of the news reports of DGUs occur. Let’s capitalize on this first. Once the non-gun-owning voter warms up to the idea of self-defense inside-the-home their sentiments will have started to roll in the right direction. After this level of issue-awareness has sunk in we can turn to the street context.

  15. There was a short video, I think ttag posted it a year or two back, pretty decent production. I can’t find the link anywhere but maybe someone remembers. Basically, young hipster dude runs into abandoned warehouse to save girl but she has been shot in the head. He starts time tripping and goes back and posts a “no guns” sign but she still dies. Posts lots of no gun signs, same result…. Anyone know the video I am referencing?

    • I think AnOregonian posted it above. I just checked the link to see if it was the one I was thinking of. It wasn’t. It appeared to involve time travel.

  17. Don’t Let Hillary Clinton Leave You Defenseless @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPM8e_DauUw.

    It’s the one where her gun disappears and then she’s … something involving crime scene tape and lots of cops standing around.

    I like most of the new NRA commercials. They should have been doing this sort of thing for decades.

  18. What is needed is commercials that operate on an emotional and visceral level. That way they bypass the thinking part of the mind.

    Commercials need to be about gun control being racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist. Being called these things equivalent to being called a Nazi these days.

    Commercials about police response time. Those would have people commit crimes and get away with a clock ticking down. The clock would still have several minutes on it when the commercial is over.

    Commercials about genocidal regimes using gun control to disarm a population before exterminating it. End with “Never Again.” This is calling the opponents Nazis.

    Maybe something patriotic about how the Battle of Lexington and Concord was fought when a tyrannical government attempted to seize the firearms from private citizens. This makes gun control fundamentally un-American. Like marrying your cousin.*

    *From http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2002/04/the_love_that_dare_not_speak_its_surname.html:
    A new group is struggling for acceptance. The group is people who are married to their cousins. These people note that 20 percent of marriages around the world are between first cousins, that Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin married their first cousins, and that first-cousin marriage, while prohibited in half the United States, is legal in Canada and throughout Europe.

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