Gun control advocates don’t call themselves gun control advocates. And for good reason. The word “control” doesn’t test well among most Americans; citizens who view government control — of anything — as something to be avoided. Resisted even. So to fool most of the people most of the time, gun control advocates have tried to rebrand their crusade for civilian disarmament. Like this . . .

1. Gun Safety

Gun control advocates have taken to calling gun control “gun safety.” They use the term to mislead folks into believing that restricting civilian access to firearms makes society (and YOU!) safer. While the champagne socialists at the New York Times and MSNBC dutifully adopted the “gun safety” moniker for their gun control advocacy reportage, most of the rest of the mainstream media isn’t buying it.

Why would they? Gun safety means being safe with a gun; what you learn at NRA and other introductory firearms ownership  classes. Duh. On occasion, gun control advocates claim that actual gun safety is one of their goals, but it isn’t (when was the last time you saw the Brady Campaign hand out gun locks or teach shooter the four rules?).Truth be told, the only gun safety they want is safety from civilians who own guns. And their votes, of course.

2. Gun Reform

Gun Reformers Try to Engineer a Win in New Mexico blares Michael Bloomberg’s pet propagandists at The Trace. Yeah, that’s not gonna work. The word “reform” is old-fashioned and vague. Those who know what it means are smart enough to know “gun reform” is the only term more maddeningly misleading than “gun safety.” Hello? You can’t reform an inanimate object.

Equally, tens of millions of Americans know that guns aren’t in and of themselves a problem. If they don’t, this confusing and misleading term doesn’t help convince them. An excellent reason the antis should use it more often.

3. Gun Violence Prevention

Hillary Clinton’s campaign website [still] exploits and riffs on the name of the former leading lights of the gun control industry: The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. And why not? “Gun violence prevention” doesn’t focus on guns per se. We’re working to prevent bloodshed, not trying to take your guns away!

Gun violence prevention is almost perfectly misleading. The term “gun violence” puts the focus on guns rather than perpetrators; when did you last hear about an example of “knife violence”? I say “almost” because GVP opens the door to non-firearms-related causes of “gun violence”: poverty, a failed education system, revolving door justice, the lack of a traditional family structure, drug addiction and criminal predation.

GVP is the antis’ best branding effort yet. It hasn’t found favor . . . yet. But it’s not for lack of trying. “Privately, advocates for gun violence prevention concede that the chances of substantial reform efforts succeeding elsewhere are dismal,” the aforementioned Trace story opines. Clunky much? One can only hope.

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38 COMMENTS

    • Immediately followed by “reasonable,” because it NEVER is reasonable to infringe the uninfringeable.

    • I was going to say the same thing. Although it’s not a euphemism for gun control, it still is one of the most nauseating and misleading terms that has proliferated in the gun debate.

    • …propping-up their gin-soaked candidate, in search of a good vein (under her sagging) flesh to pump her full of anti-seizure meds, while coasting effortlessly to the inevitable victory, and reaffirming America’s commitment to national suicide.

    • I’ll guess that photo was taken in Jabba’s bar on Tatooine. Thanks there were no slave girls outfits handy.

  4. 1. Gun safety: The Four Rules.
    2. Gun reform: Enlightening the masses to the fun, utility, and cool factor of firearms.
    3. Gun violence prevention: Truth in sentencing, hard times for hard crimes, well armed and well trained citizens, good relationship between law enforcement and community.

  5. Recently a group of morons met at the local library to discuss “violent crime reduction”.

    Yeah, right. (rolleyes)

    • At the library where I live you can open carry or carry concealed, legally. ‘No Weapons’ signs very rare & mostly ignored.

      • I tried living in a library. I read a book as a kid where some boy ran away and lived at a big department store for a month or so. I wanted to try living at the library. I hid underneath a big beanbag chair at closing time. I forgot that the librarian was my Grandmas best friend, though. When I missed supper they came and unlocked the door and made me go home. I was too young to have a gun.

        Wait. What were we talking about again?

  6. My favorite gun control neologism is “weapon of war.” Which, like the aforementioned has been crafted to elicit an emotional response on the part of an ignorant listener. I don’t own a scary black rifle but virtually every gun I own was designed with battlefield use in mind. Hell, the Mossberg M590A1 is still in military service. Should we not be allowed to own it because it holds a certain number of shells and has a bayonet lug? Never-mind that not a single army on the planet fields a semi-auto AR or AK and they’re considered “weapons of war” by our betters…and yet the commercially produced M1A is closer to its military cousin, the M14 and yet the former is not considered a “weapon of war.”

    The whole endeavor is concerned with cosmetics. The whole endeavor is bullshit.

      • Vinny, I was unaware that the M1A is on Maryland’s shitlist. Which is somewhat odd because I live in Northern Virginia, but then again I avoid the People’s Republic (and D.C. for that matter) whenever I can. I assume that it was banned because of that evil, despicable, baby killing flash hider?

        strych9, my assessment is that at some point the gun control movement will say what it’s truly thinking and propose the banning of all guns of defensive utility and the outlawing of armed self-defense (some decades down the line). After all, they constantly praise Australia and the U.K., and those regimes did exactly that. If one follows the logic (to use that word generously) of banning scary black rifles to save lives…then why not ban ANY repeating firearm? When a gun is paired with a large, compliant crowd in a confined space the type of firearm used is fairly irrelevant. Any repeating firearm (be it semi, pump, bolt or lever-action) could be used to commit mass murder given those conditions.

        So, either these moralists are supremely ignorant or just duplicitous.

        • The UK ban is based on function, no semiautomatics but straight pull AR’s are OK.
          The Australian ban is based on function AND appearance, no semiautomatics, nothing that even remotely resembles “military”. I think even Airsoft is banned in most of their states..

          Australian was Hillary’s choice.

        • Bosko: “Australian was Hillary’s choice.”

          I always considered it odd that Hillary, who professed to some knowledge of guns and how to prevent them, also professed to have not studied Australia’s gun control system.

    • You touch on something that I mentioned yesterday.

      Some of the gun control proposals I’ve bothered to read mention military use and extend that to guns that have “enough” similarity to “battlefield weapons”. If you read the text of some of these in strict terms what you discover is that they’re trying to mislead people into thinking they just want to ban “assault weapons” while leaving themselves a legal justification for banning just about everything.

      No one wants to take pops hunting rifle they say but if you read the text and consider the history of firearms it’s likely that pops bolt gun is substantially based on the Mauser action which was a “battlefield weapon”… which means means it’s something they can ban later if they choose to do so if they get this language passed.

      I don’t assume the people who wrote such a thing to be ignorant. I think they know the general public to be ignorant on the topic of guns and are trying to slip in language that sounds appealing to FUDD’s and hoplophobes when the author’s know the end goal is an effective blanket ban of firearms ownership and have quite intentionally left themselves that option. The FUDD’s think it will just ban SBR’s (scary black rifles) without considering that it’s an open invite to ban nearly all rifles of any action.

      • Yeah, guns that have a “legitimate “”sporting”” purpose”. Whatever the fuck that means, or as if it has anything to do with anything.

        • Exactly. Once you have language like that all you have to do is change the definition.

          Just look at the current questions about if that term will be expanded to encompass more rifles because of 3-gun competitions and then look at the words. Legitimate sporting purpose. Is 3-gun a sporting event? Surely. So a rifle may well have a sporting purpose but that word “legitimate” is a lot of wiggle room for .gov folks to say “Well, sure 3-gun is a sporting event but it’s not widely accepted as a sport the way football, baseball and target shooting are so we don’t find it to be a “legitimate” sport that necessitates a change in the rules”. Or you could just have someone of the opinion that 3-gun isn’t a sport and neither is golf or baseball. The only “true” sports are football and hockey. You know, manly sports where people hit each other.

          It’s kind of like Scalia’s “in common usage” theory. What constitutes “common usage”? Surely you could argue that the sale of millions and millions of scary black rifles since the end of the AWB constitutes “common use” but the counter argument to that is that they’re a small percentage of the total firearms owned. Just picking a number here, say 20 million of them have been sold since the end of the AWB, that’s 6.6% of the 300 million guns thought to be in circulation. Is that “common use”? Arguably it is not because it means that 93.4% of the guns in circulation are not SBR’s. You could double or triple the numbers and get the same argument because there’s no real definition for the threshold of what is “common usage”.

          Once you control the language and the definitions of words you can generally do whatever the hell you please.

      • Australia bans semiautomatics and pumps.
        Any Fudds care to try dove hunting with a bolt action shotgun ???

  7. Ohhh…..I thought this was going to be contest/poll post.
    My suggestion was going to to be, “tactical castration.”

  8. “Gun control” is a deceptive euphemism too. They really mean “forcible disarmament of non-police civilians.”

    What’s far worse than euphemism, though, is the deception by conflating semi-auto firearms with select-fire firearms, i.e. AR-15 (and not M-16) as “assault weapon”. How do we undo the damage caused by their repeated lie? In addition to being just plain dishonest, it’s also allowed citizen-disarmists to control the discourse on all modern firearms and leave us battling for the remains of a “privilege to keep and bear inferior clones of arms”.

  9. Everything they do revolves around optics and emotion — like a pretty girl whose appeal to your protective instinct obscures the toxic craziness beneath.

  10. Same old story . . . .

    I’m old enough to remember when the leading gun control group was the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (1970’s and 80’s). By 1989, they had figured out that wasn’t working, so they rebranded themselves as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

    Anybody remember the original name of the organization now known as the Brady Campaign? Handgun Control, Inc.

    The fact that they have to tweak their names to disguise their actual aims tells you all you need to know about them.

  11. Two that irk me are “illegal guns” and “keep guns out of the hands of bad guys.”

    Both of these euphemisms sprint out like a sooner and stake an unearned claim on the moral high ground. They frame their confiscation agenda as just good old fashioned, uncontroversial police work focused exclusively on evildoers.

    None of the actual ideas advanced under these banners even addresses bad guys or firearms used in crimes.

  13. Regardless of any gun control efforts gun control begins and ends with the individual. You either allow your guns to be taken or you don’t. Remember The Tree of Liberty Must Be Fertilized With The Blood of Tyrants and Patriots From Time to Time.

  14. How about a list of top dysphemisms for Semi-autos.

    1) Assault weapon (the original)
    2) Military grade (because assault weapon is starting to sound a bit 90s)
    3) High powered (is sometimes combined with assault weapon)
    4) Machine gun (anything with a barrel shroud and a magazine. A thing that goes on your shoulder is optional)

  17. Gun control proponents are not merely anti 2nd Amendment, they are also: Pro criminal, pro rape and anti human rights.

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