Rolling Stone Reaching by Invoking Half-Decade Old NSSF Research

It’s important to understand not just your strengths, but your weaknesses. This is important as a person, as attacking those weaknesses can make you a better person.

When you’re an organization tasked with defending a civil liberty that’s under constant attack, it’s even more important to know where you’re vulnerable.

Everyone does research to see what works for them and what works against them. Failure to do that is tantamount to a desire to lose everything.

Six years ago, the NSSF did some of that.

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone, along with The Trace, dug it up to try and illustrate that gun owners really want all sorts of gun control.

For people who the study says have a “positive feeling” about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it. The top arguments in favor almost all revolve around rights, beginning with “Self-defense is a basic right,” followed by “Americans have the right to own a gun,” “It’s people’s right as Americans to own a gun,” and “Gun ownership is protected by the Constitution.” The remaining argument, which came in at number three, states, “Owning and training with a firearm teaches important skills, including responsibility, accuracy, safe gun handling, self-defense, and strategies to avoid dangerous situations.”

When told to rank the “most effective arguments against firearm ownership,” these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: “Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.” 

Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included “Guns should be licensed just like cars,” “State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,” “Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,” and “Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.”

And yet, since this survey was conducted, Republicans have blocked efforts to pass universal background checks, which would expand the procedure to all firearms transfers instead of just commercial sales. Meanwhile, gun licensing, or rather a federal law that would require Americans to register their firearms with authorities, has been a taboo subject for many years, during which ardent gun rights advocates have argued that a registry would allow the government to disarm the populace and impose totalitarian control. The NSSF itself has asserted that a registry would “not stop criminals, nor reduce violent crime.”

The thing is, that research was about effective messaging, not the respondents’ desire to accept certain outcomes.

It’s absolutely assinine.

NSSF’s Dave Workman and Second Amendment Foundation’s Lee Williams got together to pen a piece responding to this stupidity.

A new report at The Trace—the pro-gun-control publication backed by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg—is using, and essentially misrepresenting, a six-year-old study on messaging, done for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, to suggest American gun owners “could be persuaded by the value of reforms that are vigorously opposed by the gun industry, gun rights groups, and Republican lawmakers.”

The NSSF study, conducted in 2019 for the firearms industry trade association by Responsive Management of Harrisonburg, Virginia, was done so that NSSF members, from industry chiefs to local retailers, “to provide information that they need to be successful in their communities,” according to NSSF Public Affairs Director Mark Oliva.

…

In an interview, Oliva says The Trace article—done in partnership with Rolling Stone magazine—“is grasping at straws… There’s no ‘there’ there.”

Put more bluntly, Oliva said Trace author Mike Spies is “Trying to hurt us, but I don’t think he’s landing a punch.”

It’s really not.

The truth of the matter is that Rolling Stone is hardly a bastion of unbiased journalism. Who else remembers them going on about rape on a college campus and how fraternities were basically rape cults, only to have to admit the story was absolute BS? Show of hands?

Holy crap, that’s a lot of hands.

The Trace is an anti-gun organization pretending to be about journalism. They’re better than most media outlets because they don’t try as hard to pretend to be unbiased, but they’re treated as peers by the mainstream media, while people like Workman, Williams, and I generally aren’t.

Which is fine with me, really. I prefer to hang out with a better class of people than that.

Workman and Williams note that the NSSF’s effort isn’t unlike one the anti-gun lobby undertook after Sandy Hook that dictated a lot of the anti-gun messaging strategy we currently see. 

Language is important. Knowing the right way to phrase things to get the desired reaction may seem like a waste of time, but looking at how people respond to polls based on how the question is phrased makes it pretty clear that it’s not. Some words evoke stronger reactions than others, and sometimes that stronger reaction is in a direction you’d rather the other party not take.

So, looking at effective messaging, and not just for your side, is important.

What these turdnuggets are trying to do is twist this into some kind of evidence that gun owners will tolerate all sorts of things, including gun registration, which is probably the closest thing to a universal attitude toward gun control as you’ll find in the firearm community.

But I don’t think Oliva is quite right about one thing. I don’t think this is trying to hurt us. Not directly, anyway.

I think this is trying to convince the masses that there really isn’t the opposition to these policies that we say there is. There’s no danger in forcing gun registration or even, later on, confiscation. There’s no real opposition to red flag laws and assault weapon bans, all despite so-called assault weapons being the most popular model of long gun in the country these days.

They’re trying to not so much hurt us as encourage their side to step up their game.

At least, that’s my take.

Either way, it’s a pathetic attempt that ignores what that report seems to actually be about.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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