The gun control lobby is borrowing the playbook from one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history: anthropogenic global warming.
From engaging celebrity activists to bullying private industry to portraying opponents as murderers, the well-funded and highly-orchestrated gun control lobby is copying the same approach that has been successfully deployed by the international climate change movement to sell the dubious claim that humans are causing global warming.
Indoctrination and Exploitation of Children
Textbooks are filled with bogus scientific “studies” about global warming and dire warnings about its consequences. Schools commemorate environmental holidays like Earth Day, so they can push climate dogma.
Teachers are encouraged to tag climate change in every subject area from science to health to history. And whoever disagrees, or even mildly objects, is portrayed as a child-hating monster.
After all, who wants to deny a safe future for our kids? Climate crusaders are even using children as litigants in lawsuits to sue the federal government for violating “the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as fail[ing] to protect essential public trust resources.”
Gun control activists are now seizing on that strategy. They are shamefully capitalizing off the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month, turning teen victims into celebrities and peddling these kids to news outlets as if they were candidates for public office.
Just like the climate change cabal, powerful gun control interests will hide behind the façade of children to promote their policy agenda.
Despite early assurances that the Parkland students’ uprising was purely organic, we now know that it was not: Deep-pocketed powerbrokers including former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the country’s largest teachers’ union began funding and coordinating the campaign mere hours after the massacre ended.
Last week, millions of schoolchildren — with the approval of their parents and educators — defied normal rules and walked out of class in an act of fealty to the gun control lobby. The walk-out was strongly supported by the National Education Association:
Since the horrific shootings in Parkland, Florida, students across the country have launched an inspired movement to demand long overdue action on school safety and gun control. NEA, its affiliates, and members throughout Florida and the nation, support these calls to prevent further school massacres. Educators may also wish to discuss school safety and gun violence issues with their students.
The pile-on continues this weekend. Children will gather this Saturday in Washington, D.C. and around the country to participate in the March For Our Lives, the latest protest purportedly organized by kids to demand that adults enact strict gun control laws: “March For Our Lives is created by, inspired by, and led by students across the country who will no longer risk their lives waiting for someone else to take action to stop the epidemic of mass school shootings that has become all too familiar. School safety is not a political issue.
The mission and focus of March For Our Lives is to demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues.”
Marc Morano, the head of Climate Depot, a website devoted to exposing the climate cabal’s phony science and shady tactics, writes about how children are weaponized by adult activists in his latest book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change:
If you can’t convince adults, who is a more willing and pliable audience than children? Kids from kindergarten through college are prime targets for the climate change fear promoters’ propaganda. Politicians, academia, Hollywood, and global warming activists have focused on kids, feeding them a steady diet of fear and doom, using vulnerable children to promote climate fears. The media amplifies these tactics.
Sound familiar?
Read full article at The Federalist
Classrooms turned into indoctrination centers by the leftists NEA no wonder Johnny and Sally cant read their being trained into being obidiant little robots for Big Brother and Hogg as his fellow Nazi Youths
I always teach my child that the teachers have to teach the CAGW lies, so the problem is the syllabus ( i.e. the govt ), not the teachers…..
With climate change and gun control, the data is not on the liberals’ side, so it makes sense that they would be driven to the same tactics.
With climate change carbon dioxide clearly is not impacting the climate. Of the warming on blamed on mankind forty percent was between 1910 and 1941 when carbon dioxide was much lower and not raising rapidly. The UN climate models are clearly over stating warming and don’t even come close to explaining the roman warm period, medieval warm period, or mini ice age. Yet, there is a close correlation of these events with solar cycles.
Now let’s consider the facts on gun control. Of the four biggest causes of premature death, alcohol, automobile, and drug over dose, guns come in dead last. According to National institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism, alcohol causes 88,000 deaths a year in the US. That is 2.6 times the number of all firearm deaths and 7.2 times the number of non suicide gun deaths. According to the World Health Organization in the age group 20 – 39 years approximately 25 % of the total deaths are alcohol-attributable.
In 2014 drug overdoses killed a whopping 42,032 Americans. This is old data. The problem has gotten much worse since then. My last data has auto accidents and guns close but auto accidents still killed more. We also need to put assault rifles into perspective. They used in fewer murders than any other type of firearm.
Putting things into perspective, guns are not the menace liberals would like us to believe they are. As far as preventing deaths, there is nothing advocated as gun control that doesn’t make even more sense for alcohol, such as back ground checks.
It is easy to understand why liberals are using the same tactics for gun control as they have for climate change.
Studies or research is another area where there is a great deal of similarity between climate change and gun control. In both areas, it is common for the “researchers” to start with a politically motivated conclusion, and then go about gathering data to support it. When they come across data that doesn’t support their conclusion, they either ignore it, hide it, or replace it with computer simulations. Refusing to release the data of a study has also been found in both areas. This is also true of using incorrect scientific principles. The CDC did so in a gun control study where they treated firearms as a vector.
There are exceptions. A friend of mine was involved in one of the studies done by the University of California. They started with the assumption that gun was needed. However, unlike other studies they used scientific principles and kept an open mind. Their conclusion was that gun control wasn’t needed.
After talking about the similarities of climate change and gun control I need to address some differences. When ever there is a push for gun control, there a buying frenzy. In the 1970’s California had an initiative to ban the procession of handguns. I know of one person who responded by buying five handguns. The initiative failed but he kept the guns. The story repeats again and again with people buying assault rifles when there was some sort of push against them. There have been times when factories where running at full capacity and unable to keep up with the demand. I have never seen a study that estimated the number of extra guns in our society that was a direct result of the gun control effort, but from what I have seen with friends, family, and at gun shows, there are probably tens of millions of extra guns. These are not the four shot bolt action hunting rifles, but the exact guns the liberals want to ban or severely control. If they had been smart they would have left gun owners alone, but with most of them being smart and being liberal are mutually exclusive terms.
With climate change there have been a few stupid actions that have increased green house emissions, but nothing on the scale that has happened with firearms.
Compliance is another difference between gun control and climate change. If gas costs a dollar more a gallon because of a carbon tax, there isn’t much that can be done about that. The same is true if renewable energy increases the rate charged for power by a factor of three. However, a well cared for firearm lasts generations. In many cases the ammunition used by those that would be banned is also used by those that would be still be legal, and there is reloading. Liberals talk to themselves rather than gun owners and no idea how low compliance would be. There is one good indication. A number of years ago California passed a law requiring the registration of assault rifles. One estimate I read was to put one percent of those who defied the law in jail would take the entire prison capacity of the state.