The GWH Gun Shop: Untruth in Advertising

From: gunswithhistory.com

From: gunswithhistory.com

In an utterly typical approach by anti-gun activists, another ‘public service announcement’ has been produced by States United to Prevent Gun Violence, one more anti-gun group claiming 200,000 supporters that declines to identify its sources of funding. SUPGV previously brought us last year’s rather ludicrous video “Ed” which was apparently intended to depict the antiquity of the 2nd Amendment. This new one is about the mythical “GWH Gun Shop”, probably standing for Guns, with Hysteria. AdWeek is impressed, but we needn’t be.

Stage hypnotists succeed because audience members who volunteer to be hypnotized are usually people who want to be hypnotized, which is about all that’s necessary to accomplish that. Anyone who thinks they could just walk in to one of the nearly extinct gun stores in NYC and buy a gun would buy anything. No one can own a pistol there without already having a virtually unobtainable NYC permit. Merely holding the firearms shown in this video without actually having that permit or being a Federal Firearms Licensee would earn multiple felony charges. It’s another David Gregory moment.

The conceit is that customers experience a complete turnabout from interest in buying a gun to swearing them off for life upon learning that people have been notoriously killed with the very models they are perusing. It even seems implied that the very guns they are seeing are the actual murder weapons. Then there are convincingly earnest statements made by the shoppers about their conversions. (Perhaps they’re actors, or perhaps they’re just those few attractive ‘customers’ who didn’t react normally by challenging the clerk about what he is up to anyway).

The usual sorts of misstatements are rife. There is a “9mm Submachine Gun” listed in the “Best Sellers Collection”. There are also a “Semi-Automatic Assault Rifle” and a “.223 Caliber Rifle” whose pictures are identical despite sporting, respectively, 100 round vs. 30 round magazines. [All my italics.] Poetic license, surely. At least, rather than repeating nonsense like gun ownership increasing the risk of violent death up to 43 times, they acknowledge it may be as low as 1.5 times (which can approach zero with the responsible behavior that should accompany ownership of any potentially harmful household article).

Why even address patently absurd fiction like this? Simply because it is absurd, the kind of raw, manipulative appeal to emotion rather than reason that is all firearm fear-mongers can muster. Let’s see people’s reactions to guns labelled according to the 760,000 or more times each year that they prevent crime and save lives. How impressive would that be?

 

Robert B Young, MD

— DRGO editor Robert B. Young, MD is a psychiatrist practicing in Pittsford, NY, an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

All DRGO articles by Robert B. Young, MD.