Selling the Shooting

[WilliamPitt]

A boy looks on as a customer inspects a pistol at the Saratoga Arms Fair
at the City Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Jan. 12, 2013.
(Photo: Nathaniel Brooks / The New York Times)

Selling the Shooting
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 17 January 2013

(snip)

On the whole, the administration's proposals are about as bold as one could hope for in this day and age; more than 900 people have been shot to death since the massacre at Sandy Hook, and Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot through the skull, and President Reagan was shot way back when, and his press secretary took a bullet to the head that day and has spent his whole life since trying to keep that from happening to anyone else, and Columbine happened, and Aurora happened, and the Sikh temple massacre happened, and the body count from American gun violence has been spinning like the fare meter on a Manhattan taxicab since Bobby Kennedy got his brains blown out in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen almost 50 years ago, and still, after everything that has happened and after everything we know, we all somehow became convinced that stuffing the Biblical camel through the eye of the Biblical needle would be easier than passing sensible gun control legislation on a national level in America.

That, my friends, is salesmanship.

Salesmanship the likes of which has rarely been seen in history, even in this nation of boiling commercialism. It is no small accomplishment to convince millions of people that their safety and security - indeed, their very existence as a nation - absolutely depends upon the astonishing preponderance of devices that kill them on the hour, every hour, every day.

All the gun lobby does is bellow about freedom, about the Constitution, about preserving the ability to defend oneself against the onset of an intrusive, tyrannical government. This is the song that has been sung for decades now, to the point that it is holy writ to those who think the ability to own an AR-15 with a magazine capacity large enough to take out half of Yankee Stadium, should the need somehow arise, is the apotheosis of American freedom. Good luck with that; send me a note from the front, hero. I'm sure your Red Dawn fantasy will unspool itself any day now.

Convincing so many people that their freedom is inviolably attached to things that kill them in piles every single day is amazingly successful salesmanship...and as we embark upon this national debate over guns, we must encompass this essential truth: all the grandstanding over personal freedom, over the Constitution, over the ability to defend oneself against the government, is the end-product of perhaps the most magnificent sales job ever deployed against anyone, ever.

Understand the bottom line here, best described by an astute observer: "I think the real problem gun manufacturers face is an inability to build planned obsolescence into their products. Unlike other instrument with moving parts, a gun can continue to shoot for a very, very long time. Hence, for gun manufacturers to remain profitable, the number of firearms in society and their lethality must continually increase if for no other reason than to maintain enough novelty to encourage new purchases."

There it is.

The root of the problem.

The NRA and the gun lobby in general getting into bed with the Republicans and the far right, all the shouting about freedom and the Constitution, is just window-dressing to the gun-makers. They don't believe that baloney; they just use it to sell their products, because unlike a Toyota or a blender, their products pretty much last forever.

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13967-selling-the-shooting

The underlined portion is a comment made yesterday by DUer sulphurdunn; the link to that DU post is in the TO article, and is here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2200542

[djean111]

1. Hmmmm....maybe there should be a conspiracy theory that the NRA stages shootings

in order to sell more guns......
More plausible than saying Obama stages shootings in order to seize all the guns, really.

[bongbong]

2. Probably true

Why do you think the NRA wants felons to have guns?

They knew their idea to keep a list of the mentally ill wouldn't go anywhere; that's why they proposed it (to make it look like they care). In truth, they want as many guns as possible to get into criminal & mentally ill hands, so there are more crimes & shootings, and then in response even more guns sold. It's a pyramid scheme.

Fear-filled Delicate Flowers have to own gun(s) so they can work up enough courage to walk out the door. More shootings just reinforces their fear, and makes them want to buy another Precious to "feel safe". It's all about emotion for the gun nuts.

There are other items that defy obsolescence, and thus need extra-special salesmanship to keep the cash registers ringing. But guns are a special case; is there anything else that has a direct relationship between dead people & more profits???

[WilliamPitt]

3. Up