A beautiful little blonde girl kneeling by a swimming pool reaches for a floating inflatable pink flamingo and falls in. She immediately sinks to the bottom. The mother rushes out, falls to her knees and prays, “Please God, save her.” Various people offer “Thoughts and prayers,” transitioning in attitudes from feigned sympathy to overtly disingenuous and hollow.
A message appears on the screen as ominous music builds:
The number one killer of children in the United States is not drowning or car wrecks or cancer. The #1 killer of children in the US is GUN VIOLENCE. THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE MEANINGLESS WHEN YOU CAN ACT. Act Now. Demand gun reform.
That’s an impressive number of concentrated falsehoods crammed into a one-minute propaganda spot, designed by seasoned professionals who base their careers on manipulating the emotions of the ignorant and the willfully deluded.
“The first question is: What is a child?” John Lott, economist, author, and President of the Crime Prevention Research Center, notes, dissecting an identical “#1 KILLER of CHILDREN” claim made by the White House and showing it to be a crafted narrative being parroted by major media. Allow for the inclusion of up-to-20-year-olds, conflate gang homicides and troubled adolescent suicides with little blonde Susie falling in the pool, and ignore non-corroborating data sources and “progressive” wordsmiths aiming for visceral reactions from the unknowledgeable know just how to push all the right buttons. It’s what they do for a living.
The next deception is that “gun violence” (itself a manipulative fabricated term designed to trigger a fear response by presuming culpability in inanimate objects, a.k.a. “magic”) is not a homogenous cultural phenomenon.
Again, turning to Lott, “Murders in United States are very concentrated: 2% of counties had 56% of the murders in 2020, 52% of US counties had zero murders… Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them…”
That’s not where the propagandists are steering people’s attention, though, is it? Most “child gun deaths” don’t occur on privileged white estates with swimming pools. But the manipulators behind the video know their target (Democrat) audience and are counting on them having more sympathy for a stereotypical adorable little blonde girl than for who the real victims of criminal violence are apt to be.
That’s ingrained racism masked as inclusiveness by “progressives” who have the connections to finance film projects with high production values. Privileged elitist money funding Astroturf efforts is a familiar story that goes beyond ad campaigns, and there are plenty of those, and extend into financing citizen disarmament initiatives and filling Democrat campaign war chests.
That their message here is “Thoughts and prayers are meaningless when you can act” advances more Democrat assumptions, by diminishing religion as useless, and by showing that individuals are helpless to intervene and need what they really worship, government, to come in and “save” them from their own choices by enacting prohibitions to limit them.
The entire premise of the video is absurd. What is a child, who does not know how to swim, doing unsupervised and alone next to the pool? Why didn’t the mother jump in and save her? And why didn’t a child living in a house with a pool know how to swim in the first place?
It’s the same attitude such people take with guns, disparaging attempts to provide development-appropriate education and training, and abdicating/actively discouraging all responsibility for defense of self and family, instead “relying” on the government idol they worship to come to their rescue. Talk about a futile prayer!
That’s understandable if you look at the organizations promoting themselves with the video: Mothers for Democracy, Newtown Action Alliance, Lives Robbed, and Change the Ref.
AmmoLand has presented reports featuring Newtown Action Alliance many times over the years, but really, only one takeaway is needed.
If you’re a gun owner, their posted hatred of NRA extends to you. Lives Robbed blames guns for the gun-free zone Uvalde murders, where armed police responders hung back for over an hour while children were being killed. And Change the Ref was founded by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, parents of a child killed at “gun-free” Parkland, where again, police held back, and who, as immigrants to this country, have now made it their mission to get the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to rule against U.S. gun makers. (As an aside, check out the slick, professionally produced “Ban Assault Weapons” video on their website, featuring Hollywood “stars” Will Farrell, Steve Martin, nepo baby Ben Stiller, and more.)
As for Mothers for Democracy, there’s not a lot to show who’s behind them. They’ve registered their website through a proxy and just got their IRS tax ruling this year, so there are no tax forms to look up yet. They have a PAC but their FEC filing doesn’t tell us much beyond their treasurer and bank (which is Amalgamated, the same SEIU-affiliated bank behind Merchant Category Codes).
Basically, they’re “progressive” apparatchiks, and their website shows them, in addition to clamoring for citizen disarmament, embracing and promoting “public education” (read teacher’s unions), “In librarians we trust” (presumably meaning promoting “Drag Queen Story Hours” and providing sexually explicit LGBTQ books to minors), and, of course, demanding to be able to perpetrate abortion violence, the real #1 killer of children, and one that disproportionately affects people of color to boot.
That they’re a wholly Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots group, can be gleaned from their social media. They’ve been around for almost a year now and have only managed to attract 1.2K Facebook followers and 1,310 X followers. That their stupid drowning video has brought in almost 60,000 views in three days doesn’t appear to be swelling their ranks, and while some useful idiots are giving them kudos in comments, as more people learn about it it’s clear they aren’t buying it.
Still, there’s a solution to the drowned girl of noncolor suggested by another slick and ludicrously character-revealing anti-gun video the well-heeled “liberal” prohibitionists put out a few years back: Just throw in a flotation sex toy, and problem solved.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
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