Gun Control does not sell well in America. Despite billions spent pushing it over decades and the enthusiastic cooperation of almost all of America’s most recognizable celebrities and musicians, not to mention aggressive support from Big Blue Tech, large majorities of Americans remain opposed to additional gun control laws.
In other words, the gun control marketing effort has been a collosal failure. In the private sector, any Marketing executive with the track record of the Gun Control lobby would have been fired a long time ago… and yet Bloomberg and the Brady Org. and Moms Against etc. continue to limp along, nourished by a steady diet of donations from the kind of people who live in exclusive gated communities and who couldn’t find a gun crime within fifty miles of their homes even with a bloodhound and a police escort.
But if you’re committed to fighting against the efforts of these groups, as I am, you can watch as every decade or so the gun control marketing sell shifts in an effort to find some new messaging that might work.
For the last few years the narrative has been to call the AR-15, the eternal bugaboo of the anti-gun crowd, a “Weapon of War.” The idea being that if they can convince enough Americans that the AR-15 is a “weapon of war” that those same Americans will finally agree that they must be banned.
But the Weapon of War argument has a fatal flaw, and it is this. The AR-15 is different from its closest military cousins the M16 and M4 in at least one very significant way… the AR-15 does not have a selective fire switch (google it, Millennial). Without that selective fire switch an AR-15 is no different from any other everyday hunting rifle, except in cosmetic appearance. It is not, in other words, a weapon of war. To claim otherwise is to argue that there’s no difference between Eddie Van Halen and the guitarist from the Van Halen cover band at your kid’s high school battle of the bands.
On the other hand, there is the 1911 .45 ACP. The Colt 1911 pistol served as the standard-issue sidearm for the US Armed Services from 1911 to 1985. Throughout those years, as now, you could walk into any gun store in America and buy the exact same 1911 carried into battle by literally millions of American G.I.’s for 75 years. There is no difference whatsoever between the 1911’s sold in stores and the ones carried to battlefields like The Somme, Anzio, Tarawa, Omaha Beach, Chosin and Khe Sahn. The 1911 is, quite literally, an actual weapon of war.
And yet, none of the folks on the anti-gun side of the aisle have ever sought, nor will they ever seek, to make the 1911 illegal for Americans to own.
Why not?
If the argument is that weapons of war must be kept off the streets, then it makes no sense to ban the AR-15 (which is not a weapon of war) but not the 1911 (which very much is).
If I believed that we had a fair and unbiased Press I would suggest that someone in that Press Corps put this question to one of the various anti-gun spokesholes whom they so gleefully quote day-after-day in their efforts to assist the anti-gun marketing effort, but no, I won’t hold my breath.
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