I’d like to recommend a little light reading for your weekend, and it won’t cost you a cent. It’s Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging, a downloadable 84-page book containing almost all the strategies and tactics employed by the gun control gang.

One thing you will notice is that the Second Amendment gets very little mention, and what it does get is almost entirely about Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller. McDonald v. City of Chicago gets a brief mention, too.

This isn’t surprising: Knowledgeable gun-control fans know there’s nothing they can do about the Second Amendment itself. The process described in Article V of the U.S. Constitution and the fact that the gun-grabbers would have to persuade 38 states to ratify a new amendment is a barrier to the hopes of all but the most optimistic gun control Pollyannas.

The book came out in 2012, so there’s no mention of Bruen or Rahimi. It was also when the National Rifle Association was riding high and membership was peaking. As you might expect, the NRA is the principal villain in this book, sort of like the Death Star in Star Wars or Godzilla.

The book’s emphasis on emotional appeals as propaganda displays a quite unflattering cynicism. They’re shedding crocodile tears while standing on the bodies of the slain, demanding laws that wouldn’t have saved them.

The books authors emphasize avoidance of “(t)he political food fight in Washington or wonky statistics.” That’s almost humorous, considering how “wonky” the statistics used by Everytown and Giffords really are.

Gun control is all about using weaponized language and well-cooked statistics to create bogeymen and alarm the public. It depends on inventing terms like “assault weapon” and “gun violence” and using public ignorance and a very cooperative mainstream media to peddle them.

Sources like the Gun Violence Archive inflate the number of mass shootings: So far in 2025, the GVA claims there have been 124 mass shootings in the U.S. while the Violence Prevention Project, which has a far more exhaustively researched database, reports no mass shootings since September last year.

But which number, 124 or zero, is more likely to be on the evening news?

It’s just like the exaggerations in the K-12 School Shooting Database I mentioned in a previous article.

In his classic 1984, George Orwell wrote: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

It’s called the Big Lie. Adolf Hitler also wrote about it in Mein Kampf. The idea is if you’re going to lie, make it a big lie; repeat it frequently. Eventually, the public will come to accept the Big Lie.

How effective is this? In February 2019, Marist conducted a poll of 880 adults. The survey was commissioned by NPR and PBS and covered ‘popular’ gun control laws.

The results were as one would expect: Big numbers for the gun-grabbers’ agenda.

However, the last question on the survey unintentionally affirmed how well the Big Lie works.

The question was: “From what you have heard or read, do you think, compared to 25 years ago, the per capita gun murder rate in the U.S. is higher, lower, or about the same?”

59% of the survey group said the rate had gone up; 23% said it was about the same.

According to data from the FBI and the CDC, over the 25 years from 1994 to 2018, the murder rate plunged 37 percent.

82% of those responding believed something demonstrably untrue.

Was that ever mentioned in the media coverage of the study? No.

As you read Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging, you will learn an important fact: The gun-control movement doesn’t care about the Second Amendment or the rights it protects. They dismiss it by saying they support it or they’re not coming to take our guns away. They then proceed to ignore it, confident the public will agree.

What this means is we’re fighting the wrong battle. The Second Amendment doesn’t need defending; it’s secure and even the zealots in the gun control movement realize this.

General George S. Patton once said: “No one ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

That’s good advice. We should heed it. Instead of being on the defensive, we need to “attack and attack and attack some more.” Our target is gun control’s Big Lies, the biggest of which is the claim gun control laws save lives, even though there isn’t any statistical evidence to support that claim.

This battle is going to be tough, but we must win it by discrediting gun control; by exposing their Big Lies and destroying their stereotypes of gun owners.

About Bill Cawthon

Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago and has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.