A New Video From Brady And The NRA Better Watch Out.

March 12, 2024

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I just watched one of the best YouTube videos on guns that I have ever seen. It is posted by the Brady Campaign and you can view it directly on YouTube or pull it down from the new Brady website called crimadvisor.com. The website, like the video, is a tongue-in-cheek riff on a campaign the Brady folks have been running for years which correlates rates of gun violence with state gun laws, the idea being that states with stricter gun controls experience less gun violence. Brady’s new effort to sell this idea is a website that spoofs TripAdvisor and a remarkably original video that sets a new standard for the gun debate on both sides.

The bizarre notion that we protect ourselves with laws is a direct challenge to the NRA mantra which says that the best way to protect ourselves is with guns. If it were up to the NRA, we’d go back and undo the GCA68, get rid of background checks entirely and let all those ‘law-abiding’ folks out there walk around with their unlicensed guns and protect the rest of us from the criminals and the thugs. The NRA promotes this armed citizen nonsense through its video channel that features a group of very serious-minded folks didactically delivering one boring commentary after another on the hows and whys of carrying guns.

brady I have never been comfortable at the extent to which the pro-gun community uses video to promote its agenda if only because so much of the content used to create their digital messaging simply isn’t true. For example, last year one of the NRA commentators, Billy Johnson, criticized the General Social Survey which showed that gun ownership had declined from 50% of all households to just 34% over the previous twenty years, citing a Gallup Poll which stated that more than 40% of all American households actually contained guns. The only problem is that what Johnson didn’t say was that while Gallup had a higher number for gun-owning households, its survey had also shown a decline in gun ownership over the same period of time. By omitting this critical information, Johnson was able to pretend that the GSS finding about declining gun ownership wasn’t true. What was really true was the way in which Johnson distorted the evidence to support his own point of view.

But the whole point of video is that it’s not the facts per se that gets your message across to the audience, but the personality, stagecraft and overall artistry of what viewers are watching which drives the message home. And here is where, when it comes to the gun world, the new Brady video has absolutely no peer. Close my eyes for a second and I thought I was listening to Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers, the 1994 Oliver Stone - Quentin Tarantino movie where two psychopaths go roaming around the Southwest attacking everyone and everything in sight with their guns.

But while the on-screen antics of the Brady gun-toting wannabes create an element of satire and cleverness that’s just plain fun, it’s not that difficult to slip behind the sarcastic message of this production and perceive the basic argument of the Brady campaign that localities with weak gun regulations make us less, not more safe from crimes with guns. If you need some hard data to convince you further about where Brady stands, the video moves easily and seamlessly to the website where you can examine the gun-law environment in all 50 states.

I hope that Brady’s video goes viral and that this will be the first of a series of productions in which our two as-yet unnamed characters hold forth on a variety of relevant issues related to guns. The real challenge in social media is not reaching the folks who are already committed to what you believe; it’s reaching the folks who can become committed because they like the way you say it, and this video says it better than it’s ever been said.

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The Politics Of Gun Control

June 15, 2024

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So here’s the big question: If Harry Reid makes good on his threat to bring a gun control bill back to the Senate this year, what’s the chance that it will pass? And the answer is: probably not very good. And the reason that it’s not very good isn’t because the NRA is such a behemoth in the halls of Congress that they always get their way. In fact, the NRA is very adept at taking credit for how the geography of gun ownership just happens to slant any national debate about gun control in their direction; a tilt that will probably continue for years to come. Here’s how it works.

Gun ownership in this country is skewed towards the West and the South. It is estimated that there are 27 states in which per capita gun ownership reaches 40% or more, with Western states like Montana and Wyoming probably having a gun in every home. Only one Republican Senator from any of these 27 states - Susan Collins, voted for Manchin-Toomey last year, and 4 Democratic Senators from these states broke ranks with their party and also voted against the bill.

reidThe NRA doesn’t have to waste any time or resources going after votes in the 23 states that have per capita gun ownership of less than 40 percent. All they have to do is make sure they can find enough votes in the ‘gun-rich’ states to kill any bill on the Senate floor. And they also don’t have to spend all that much money on grass roots campaigns, telling their supporters to “flood” Congress with phone calls, emails and the like. Because together, these 27 states where gun ownership is so prevalent count less than 90 million residents; in other words, when it comes to national gun control, a majority of states hold less than 30 percent of the country’s population (and voters) as a whole.

The big problem facing gun control advocates at the federal level is that while the states that have the lowest per capita gun ownership contain a much larger overall population than the gun-rich states (these 11 states have nearly 120 million residents,) together they count only for 22 Senate votes, and that’s assuming that these 22 Senators are all Democrats, which they are not. So in order to get a gun control bill passed and sent to the House, the battle comes down to the votes of the 24 Senators who come from 12 states where gun owners aren’t a majority, including Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Ohio, states which often send Republicans to the Senate who won’t break ranks with their party’s leadership over gun control anyway.

The NRA would love a big red turnout in November as a way of keeping Obama under control during the last two years of his second term. If this happens, both sides will spend every minute gearing up for the big one in 2016 and a gun control bill, along with probably every other piece of legislation, can go fly a kite. So in the short term, the battle over guns at the federal level will probably continue to favor the NRA. On the other hand, in the longer term, the same demographic geography that gives less than one-third of the country’s population a veto over new gun laws may also begin to favor the other side.

What the NRA cannot change is the fact that the country is becoming more urban, more ethnically and racially diverse, and more dependent on single-parent households, all demographics that have little or no interest in owning guns. You also don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that these changes will impact state legislatures and the shape of Congressional districts after the 2020 census which, following 2016, will only be four years away. Given all that, I’ll take the short odds on the NRA for the next couple of years, but by the end of this current decade I’m willing to bet that even in what are now gun-rich states, you’ll begin hearing a much different tune.

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