It is a serious mistake not to “defend” the Second Amendment from false and malicious attacks by its detractors. Propaganda is any communication, whether honest or dishonest, whose purpose is to influence attitudes, values, and behavior; anti-smoking posters, anti-drunk-driving posters, and requests for blood donations are examples of honest and constructive propaganda. Propaganda in political controversies is almost exclusively an offensive weapon, and everyone should use it as such.
Colonel Paul Linebarger’s Psychological Warfare says it is relatively futile to try to parry or discredit enemy propaganda because they have already done the damage the enemy has done with their argument. “Therefore, propaganda does not meet propaganda. Combat forces meet; Psychological Warfare forces pass one another in opposite directions.” Jonathan Swift wrote similarly in 1710, emphasis is mine, “Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late, the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted: or, like a physician who has found out an infallible medicine after the patient is dead.”
“As the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has believers: & it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour it has done its work, & there is no farther occasion for it.Falsehood flies, & truth comes limping after it”Jonathan Swift h/t @SykesCharlie https://t.co/o5Zs5uSbEG
— John Dickerson (@jdickerson) November 2, 2022
Then-Lieutenant George S. Patton wrote similarly in his Saber Exercise of 1914, “The saber is solely a weapon of offense and is used in conjunction with the other offensive weapon, the horse. In all the training, the idea of speed must be conserved. No direct parries are taught, because at the completion of a parry, the enemy is already beyond reach of an attack. The surest parry is a disabled opponent.”
Our goal must be not to attempt to parry the other side’s wide array of attacks on gun owners, licensed gun dealers, and law-abiding firearm manufacturers but to disable the other side’s credibility with the American people. We must accordingly depict the other side as dishonest and incompetent gun quacks, and I mean in the same context as cancer quacks, whose actions will put law-abiding people at risk. We must ask repeatedly, “If what they want to do is right, why do they need to lie?” Once somebody is proven a liar, nothing he or she says afterward has any meaning—that’s why “giving somebody the lie” was once a literally mortal insult, and being proven guilty of this character defect is still cause for expulsion from the US Military Academy—and the surest parry is indeed a disabled opponent.
- Knowledge of the Constitution is an essential requirement for the practice of law, and there is no Second Amendment right to hunt. Joe Biden’s statement that you can load only three shells to hunt waterfowl is a partial truth told with intent to deceive, which the US Military Academy’s Honor Code defines as a lie. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s statement that nobody needs ten bullets to kill a deer shows that he is either dishonest or incompetent to practice law, the latter if he believes the Second Amendment is a right to hunt deer or anything else. When Cuomo was HUD Secretary, he advocated frivolous and malicious junk lawsuits against gun manufacturers, further reflecting his lack of character and integrity.
- Biden also advised people to fire shotguns to scare off prowlers, reinforcing the perception that he is dishonest, incompetent, or both. Steven Nelson’s “Joe Biden’s Shotgun Advice Could Land Jill Biden in Jail” cites several Delaware laws that would be violated were somebody to discharge a weapon inside city limits except for self-defense against an immediate violent threat. President Biden is licensed to practice law in Delaware, and Biden should know better.
President Biden‘s depiction of knife-wielding assailants as “unarmed” and his suggestion that police officers shoot to wound prove his dangerous incompetence in the realities of armed self-defense.
Katie Couric’s and Stephanie Soechtig’s Under the Gun claimed to prove how easy it is to buy a gun without a background check. “We sent a producer out, and he was from Colorado. He went to Arizona, and he was able to buy a Bushmaster and then three other pistols without a background check in a matter of four hours. And that’s perfectly legal. … He just met somebody in a parking lot in Wendy’s and bought a Bushmaster legally.” A Colorado resident cannot legally purchase a firearm in a private sale in another state. It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that they made up the story and peddled this fake narrative as a documentary. The producers claim they turned the guns over to police to be destroyed, but this does not change the fact that it was illegal for a Colorado resident to buy them in a private sale in Arizona in the first place, so I believe it never happened.
- The Million Mom March, supported by Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and other prominent enemies of the Second Amendment, solicited money and volunteer time under the fraudulent premise that firearm violence kills 12 or 13 children a day. This is true only if one reclassifies young legal adults, 18 and 19 years old and in a very violent demographic age group, as children. The MMM liquidated in 2001 after I and others exposed it for misusing 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money to promote House candidates on its website.
- The 501(c)(3) tax-exempt “educational” Violence Policy Center (VPC) says openly, “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” To me, it sounds like the VPC wants to exploit rather than clear up this confusion to gain support for its agenda.
- The Million Mom March, supported by Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and other prominent enemies of the Second Amendment, solicited money and volunteer time under the fraudulent premise that firearm violence kills 12 or 13 children a day. This is true only if one reclassifies young legal adults, 18 and 19 years old and in a very violent demographic age group, as children. The MMM liquidated in 2001 after I and others exposed it for misusing 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money to promote House candidates on its website.
- The 501(c)(3) tax-exempt “educational” Violence Policy Center (VPC) says openly, “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” To me, it sounds like the VPC wants to exploit rather than clear up this confusion to gain support for its agenda.
The phrase "gun violence" is a fascinating demonstration in how much influence the gun ban lobby has over much of the media and many politicians, who both repeat the propaganda phrase uncritically.
Obviously, gun-related crime is a thing, which is what the shooting in Michigan… https://t.co/3meWv9Xe8M
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) February 15, 2023
The bottom line is that if somebody is doing the right thing, he or she does not need to lie to make it happen. The fact that the anti-Second Amendment side needs to lie repeatedly, with the active participation of the head of the Democratic Party, should tell voters everything they need to know in 2024.
By Bill Levinson, Wilkes-Barre, PA
The views expressed are his own and not those of his employer or any non-political organization he is a member of.