Here’s How We Can Defeat The Gun Culture – Without Congress

We can transform gun ownership from being toxically masculine to pathetic and silly with just the right message.

A more effective anti-gun campaign? Artist: Tom Muir.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – In the aftermath of another heartbreaking gun massacre, this time in Uvalde, Texas, we need to start calling Republicans what they really are: paid spokesmen for the retail firearms industry. 

Each and every slimy GOP member of Congress is a version of Ronald McDonald, but instead of selling fat, sugar, and salt to children, they’re selling stockpiles of guns to hobbyists whose fantasy lives and military dress-‘em-up has nothing to do with well-regulated militias, nothing to do with pushing back against government agents, and nothing to do with defending themselves from burglars. After all, the U.S. military can easily overrun these sloppy little men, and home invasions usually don’t end with the invader being killed, they end with the homeowner being killed with his own firearm.

And the Second Amendment? It’s nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy. The gun lobby and its sales team only care about constitutional rights as a cheap hook, like Subway telling us that its sandwiches are fresh and therefore healthy or Fred Flintstone selling Lucky Strike cigarettes back in the day. 

It’s not about rights, it’s not about freedom. For the NRA, it’s all about selling as many firearms as possible. It’s about greed. It’s about profit. 

Not since the tobacco industry hooked Americans on nicotine laced with poison and as addictive as heroin, leading to epidemic levels of heart disease and lung cancer, has there been such a nefarious sector of the economy. Around 40,000 people are killed with firearms every year in the United States. According to a 2021 study:

• American taxpayers pay a daily average of $34.8 million for medical care, first responders, ambulances, police, and criminal justice services related to gun violence.

• Families directly affected by gun violence everyday face $4.7 million in out-of-pocket costs for medical bills and mental health support, and $140.3 million in losses from work missed due to injury or death.

• Society loses an estimated $586.8 million per day in intangible costs from the pain and suffering of gun violence victims and their families.

• Employers every day lose $1.4 million in productivity, revenue, and costs required to recruit and train replacements for victims of gun violence.

Freedom, right?

Last year, the firearm industry sold 19.9 million guns to American customers. Likewise, only around 17 million cars/trucks were sold in the previous year, 2019. We buy more guns than cars, accumulating more total guns than people here. It’s astonishing given our car culture and expansive national geography linked by highways.

All told, there’s a mountain of cash, a Senate filled with Ronald McDonalds, and the Supreme Court’s indulgent view on gun rights standing between us and regulating the rampant and immensely expensive (in dollars and lives) retail gun industry. It seems insurmountable, especially knowing the lack of political will to push through these roadblocks.

So what can we do that’ll actually do something?

There’s no constitutional amendment banning a long-term national ad campaign pushing back aggressively against gun culture. 

Yes, guns have been hardwired into our national DNA ever since Bunker Hill and, to a slightly lesser extent, so have cigarettes. But in the face of almost universal smoking, the pushback began. In the year 2000, the Truth Initiative began running an immensely disturbing but effective campaign aimed at stripping away the “cool” allure of smoking. The ads were graphic and relentless. Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control ran its own series ads. Combined, these short videos were convincing enough to transform something that was romanticized in pop culture while intrinsic to social lives, into a grisly, disfiguring, useless, deadly addiction.

Here’s a randomly selected ad from the CDC’s campaign. Tell me it’s not shocking enough to make an addict want to quit:

Remember, cigarettes are chemically addictive. Guns aren’t. It’s much more challenging to pry cigarettes from the hands of addicts through a national campaign than it would be to upend our gun culture through a similar campaign. 

Fast forward to the present day when cigarette smokers might as well have leprosy, huddled in the rain under awnings and smirked at by passers-by who are revolted by the stench. 22 years later and smoking no longer looks fun or cool or sexy. It just looks gross and people are afraid to even admit they smoke. Meanwhile, cigarette sales plummeted by $200 billion annually between 2000 and 2020.

Similarly, and with enough time and money, it’d be relatively easy to turn our fetish for guns into the same sort of social liability. We can transform gun ownership from being toxically masculine to pathetic and silly with just the right message, illustrating what people think guns are all about contrasted against what they actually do. Make the extremists seem pathetic and homicidal, while emphasizing that reliance on firearms is cowardly and meek, rather than masculine and tough.

If Hollywood also got involved by coordinating its message, commenting negatively on the use of guns in shows and movies, and if the music industry joined in – if our liberal pop culture lined up with the campaign to reframe guns from a Revolutionary necessity to a piece of phallic hardware with no other purpose but to kill things, we can turn the tide on this madness. There aren’t any institutional roadblocks: no courts, no senators, no filibuster. All it’ll take is a sizable investment and plenty of tenacity for the long term – and, yes, it will require decades to achieve. But it’s been done before with another deadly sector of our economy, and so it can be done again. Hell, there’s a template already in place thanks to the CDC and the Truth Initiative.

Enough is enough. The pushback starts now.

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Bill Maher And The Great Trans Debate

The comedian ripped excessive trans activism and made some valid points, but missed the big picture and is helped fuel right wing disinformation.

by Ben Cohen

Wading into the gender identity wars raging in America is bound to attract criticism whichever side I come down on. We lost subscribers to The Banter when I penned a piece chiding liberals for taking their version of identity politics too far, so I do this with a certain amount of trepidation.

That being said, it is important that we restore some sense of nuance to debate in America if civil society is to survive, and I think it is worth attempting to inject it whenever possible.

The trans rights issue is a complicated minefield of hyperbole, misinformation, disinformation and extreme emotion. It is almost impossible to find an equilibrium that satisfies everyone, but I do want to make it clear that I have no interest in fueling the right’s grotesque anti-trans bigotry that serves no other purpose than to humiliate vulnerable children and smear liberals. Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham for example, have ruthlessly exploited the issue to convince millions of Americans that liberals are, as Ingraham stated on a “warpath to gender bend our kids into submission”. These right wing extremists are of course inferring that liberals are pedophiles. "You should be arrested for that, in fact,” Tucker Carlson said of teachers who talk to kids about gender identity. “You talk to a normal person's kids about sex in kindergarten, you get beaten up. You should be beaten up, please."

This isn’t debate. This is inciting violence against your enemies.

More towards the middle ground of the issue is Bill Maher, who has spoken out against the excesses of the LGBTQ movement while professing general support for their cause. In his show this past weekend for example, Maher referenced a Gallup poll that showed an increase in the number of Americans identifying as LGBT over multiple generations. To Maher, this was a sign that self identifying as non-binary/trans etc is somewhat of a fad…

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