The NRA Was Waging War on Facts Long Before the Fake News Boom

[flamin lib]

The gun group has attacked the legitimacy of mainstream journalism for decades.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/12/nra-conspiracy-theory-fake-news-boom/

As the child of a firearms collector tagging along to gun shows and shooting ranges in the 1980s and ‘90s, I soaked up a lot of lessons that never appeared in my schoolbooks. I learned, among other things, that the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergs controlled George H.W. Bush’s administration to advance the New World Order; that David Koresh and Randy Weaver were patriots martyred by the fascist Janet Reno’s jackbooted government thugs; and that a race war was definitely coming to America — the only real question was which side the government would be on.
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The National Rifle Association has long benefited from and contributed to such conspiracy theories — and with them has helped to erode faith in American institutions like the government and the mainstream media. You can’t trust the agents of those institutions to tell you the truth, much less to have your welfare at heart, the NRA argues. As the lobby put it in a recent, un-bylined post on its website (and labeled “News”), titled “Elites Reserve the Right to Decree What is ‘Fake’ and What is ‘News’”:

Examples of their arrogance, ethical breaches, bias, and outright political collusion are now so numerous that their reporting, especially on politically charged issues like firearm policy, cannot simply be accepted at face value.

NRA News, December 1, 2016

Take a moment to think about that. Of course you wouldn’t take an arrogant, unethical, biased, politically conniving source at its word. You wouldn’t ever trust it, even if it were telling the truth. You might even make a ritual, with like-minded individuals, of trashing that source’s content, of reaffirming your rightness and the media’s wrongness. You might be possessed by what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid tendency,” confronted by a media whose interests “are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable” with your own, “and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.”

Please note that this was snipped from NRA 'news'. It is, at best, an editorial or opinion piece and at worst just what it appears to be; intentional obfuscation and misdirection.

This is a good read. If any of you have spent time in the Gungeon you'll recognize the tactics outlined here.

First disregard any information out of hand that doesn't comport with the pre-determined dogma. Then attack the source as unreliable and hopelessly biased. If possible find some tiny aspect of the source that is in some way not absolutely accurate in gun lingo. Using the word 'clip' instead of 'magazine' is enough to render the source as so hopelessly ignorant of gun technology that it can be not only dismissed but wholly ridiculed. Then pile on and echo every other reply--divide and conquer with so many red herrings that you can't possibly reply to them all.

At the risk of being harsh I can't have much sympathy for these idiot savants. They simply regurgitate any propaganda the gun lobby provides them. Gun sellers tell them that sound suppressors (aka 'silencers') will save your hearing when they only reduce noise by maybe 40 db--not enough to overcome the sonic boom of the bullet after it leaves the barrel. The only real benefit of a suppressor is to make the gun longer--something that seems to be a big deal for gunners.

As frustrating is it may be I feel sorry for these poor people. Wholly and completely unable to think outside the talking points provided by their gun selling overlords. Too afraid to leave home without a gun and face society without the crutch of a deadly weapon. I think that's called agoraphobia. It's okay if they just repeat the mantra:

It's just a simple innocent tool . . .

This is a culture war . . .

Guns don't kill people . . .

If the victim only had a gun . . .

When seconds count police are only minutes away . . .

I won't be a willing victim . . .

[elleng]

1. and the Repugs.

For a long time.