This prompts me to post an archived article I saved from many years ago............
This was written by advertising man and gun owner, Jim Houck. It's a little long, but worth the read:
The State of California says citizens, people who've not broken the law, must register their firearms.
We can say with no pro-firearm, anti-firearm arguing that only law-abiding citizens will obey this request, if anyone obeys it at all. Criminals will, as criminals do, flaunt this law and go on bashing in our skulls, raping, robbing and killing us.
California, why do you want me to register my firearm? Are you trying to create a comprehensive registry of citizens so you can later pass a bill saying I am a criminal and collect my firearm, like with citizens who own SKS rifles, who are now, suddenly criminals, though they've broken no law?
Then you would have a list (actually a partial list, because most of us are too smart for this nonsense) of what you are calling "assault weapons" or "non-sporting weapons", useless terms coined a few short years ago and now considered by default through mass media usage and birthdays to be legitimate and you have made these weapons "illegal". What can possibly come next, State? There are only two choices, repeal or confiscation. You've got your list, you've got the names and home addresses of those who've registered and you've got guns in case we don't comply and let you disarm us.
But wasn't it you, State, who told We The People, that guns were evil and caused crime and killed people and didn't the Center for Disease Control use a bunch of We The People's money to run that ad campaign about how people who own firearms are redneck beer drinkers who lie to their wives about where they were all weekend? Or was that President Clinton who said that? Or was he the one they were talking about? I'm confused, don't President Clinton and all officials of the State keep a heavily-trained group of guys around them to protect them from criminals? And don't those guys carry firearms? Isn't President Clinton afraid those beer drinking redneck wife cheaters will flip out and kill someone in a fit of psychotic rage induced by the evil radiating from the guns they carry?
"Don't help a good boy go bad," that was an ad campaign from the 60's developed by Madison Avenue elitists to shame people into locking their cars more often in an attempt to lower car theft. Who footed the bill for this campaign? Who stood to gain? Insurance companies. The campaign failed because it was 30 years ahead of its time. Back then people had this wild notion that with freedom comes responsibility and that the individual was responsible for his actions, not society. Whoa.
The real problem with the campaign was that the ad boys forgot rule number one in mass perception manipulation- you must leverage perception by degrees.
You can't just crank up the knob on We The People, they'll sense it and rebel and they're too big for the State to fight. Way too big. Anyone in advertising, like myself, knows this. I can make a broke black male from the projects spend his last dollar on a lottery ticket or a rich, single, white female spend her last $120,000 on a 560 SL Benz. It's easy. If you just know the tricks of the trade.
The Louisiana Lottery broke every record for state lottery ticket sales and still holds most of them today, almost ten years later. How could that be?
Louisiana has a relatively small population and is not very affluent. It was easy, we just had the same people buy lots of tickets over and over. I wrote the TV, print, outdoor and radio advertising for the Louisiana Lottery for years and we never said, "losing ticket" once, despite the fact that your chances of getting hit by lightening are four times higher than your chances of winning are. Our research told us that if we ever said the words "losing ticket" that people would think, I played, I lost. Then they'd never play again. We sold an average of $450,000,000 tickets a year. Louisiana does not have four hundred and fifty million new residents a year. We had repeat players.
So how did we refer to those millions and millions of losing tickets? We called them "non-winning tickets". Sound silly? Think you'd be above something so incredibly transparent? Lottery ticket sales cut across every single demographic and psychographic. Everyone plays, all types.
Think again.
For your one dollar you did not get the proverbial million dollars. You got the "thrill" of the "chance to win" a million dollars. You pay for the chance to win. Imagine paying for a car and getting the CHANCE to drive. Every time a player lost (non-winning ticket), they still believed they got their money's worth because they always got the bed wetting thrill of scratching off some silver goo and losing (chance of winning).
I have a question about this "assault weapon" term. Something you can't assault with isn't much of a weapon at all, is it? It's a cake or a pillow. The hilarious term "assault weapon" is a cheap advertising gimmick, like "cutting knife", "pre-owned vehicle" or "musical instrument".
In the ad industry we call this "fear leveraging". You spend billions of dollars on target market research to find out if the target will do what you want them to do. When they won't, and they usually will not, you then spend more money to find out what scares them the most, what pains them.
Then you exploit these fears and pains until they do what you tell them to do. You make up some fashion-based nonsense and apply a harp-seal budget.
This is a budget that is so massive that you can effectively hammer it into the heads of the target market until they give way. "Assault weapon". And we thought "Just do it" was sharp. Sarah Brady should be a creative director at a major advertising agency. She'd make a lot more money.
Now that I've educated folks a bit on the joys of mass capitalism and advertising, let's have an experiment. Religion gets more people killed every year and even if it doesn't, nobody will dispute it once we put it on TV and if they try to, we'll simply tell the networks not to sell them airtime or we'll pull our giant media buy and they'll give in to us. Yet people hold on to their religious practices with a tight grip of fear.
Let's ban religion. It's a horrible source of deadly global strife and like Sarah Brady said so well, "it has no practical application in a modern society." Isn't shame wonderful?
So, we hire an ad agency and give them a giant tax payer-funded budget. They research a way to get people to let go of their bibles and all that crap. Religion clearly makes good boys go bad.
We start small. Religion is still a hot issue, even in this modern age of genocide, and we can't afford a screw up like they did with that whole car insurance thing in the 60's. Although in the 60's people still thought individuals were responsible for their own actions. Very "Atlas Shrugged". Thankfully that is one giant hurdle we no longer have to deal with in these modern times.
We start a radio and print campaign expounding upon the "unfortunate Religious Related Killings" that are "starting to take place." See how I do that proper noun trick? It's easy, you just capitalize the first letter of each word. And notice how "Religious Related Killings" are a new thing when I say they are "starting to take place." I just dismissed the last 3,000 years of history. Nobody will mind.
After two months the media will be sympathetic and give us loads of free air time and print space and if they don't we'll make them by adding touches of overt sensationalism to the stories because that drives ratings. Won't they be surprised when they see how we repay them in exactly ten years.
Now religion is the talk of the town and the national media is buzzing with the "alarming increase" of Religious Related Killings. Important note here, once I make it an "increase" the phony term Religious Related Killings becomes legitimate by default because we've forced the target market forward in their belief system.
We never even explained how this phony term came about. Which is why we need to keep them moving. Otherwise they might ask. It's called "walking the target along a path of thin air." And man does it work.
Now that I've come up with a catchy phrase that's easy to spell and easy to remember and even easier to campaign and forced it beyond its conceptual phase in order to breathe life into it, it's time to launch the new campaign.
With Religious Related Killings on the rise, the "alarming rise", it's time for "responsible citizens" to form a "watch group". It's too early to say committee. "Committee" is too strong for now. A watch group is harmless, all they do is watch, with concern. And what do they find? Horrors! Religious Related Killings are getting kids killed. Now Religious Related Killings pose a "very real threat." You can see where this goes.
Everyone likes kids and if they don't their opinion is considered worthless by society and if they do, then they surely don't want to see them getting killed. Remember, we want to ban religion. We need fear, we need pain, we need leverage. What better leverage than children?
Next step. Religious Related Killings "account for over 40% of all adolescent related homicides worldwide" and the "figure is rising" with the onslaught of "Religious Cults" and "Religious Zealots" and "Militia groups posing as religious organizations". I knew someday the Branch Davidians would come in handy. That was a particularly intense focus group study the ATF did in Texas.
Now we put the CDC on a study. This is done to lend credibility. When a big agency studies something, it lends credibility to the potential that what they are studying actually exists in the first place.
And now for reform. It's fine to have religion and all that, but no little kid should get killed over it. Hell that flies in the face of what all those religious guys preach all the time anyway. Now we've got ire. The beauty of ire is, it makes people lose rationality, making them rather easy to guide. Mobs lynch.
Individuals generally do not. By the by, if you're worrying about that 40% figure, yes, I pulled it out of thin air. Don't give it a second thought. Nobody will ask. Once figures are put up at best they can only be disputed and while the opposition spends their time and money trying to disprove our ridiculous numbers, we'll be charging ahead to victory.
Everything on earth has been studied by guys with degrees from impressive places like Harvard or the CDC and if we can't get the results we want, we'll generate them. We'll ask five dentists if they think kids should be killed for bibles and when they say no we'll say "five out of five dentists surveyed said that kids should not die for religion". And who argues with doctors? I certainly don't.
Now we have a general clamor and the public's attention. We've generated enough target market support for the children and subsequent "neighborhoods" that are "dying" due to Religious Related Killings and "Religious Related Violence" to go for the first big precedent, licensing. "The only way to get this shocking wave of Religious Related Killings under control before it destroys our great country, our cities, our children, is to license the people who still wish to lawfully practice it." Yeehaw.
We make everyone who insists on practicing religion "despite its burden on society" "accountable". If they have "nothing to hide" they "won't mind registering themselves." The beauty of this is anyone who resists will instantly be suspect. "Good men license themselves", that will be our tagline. When its shelf life wears out, we'll switch to the more aggressive tagline of "If a friend practices religion without a license, are they really your friend?"
Now we've shifted the burden of innocence to the innocent. Before someone had to prove you guilty of some illegal activity before you faced prosecution. Now you have to constantly prove yourself innocent or face prosecution at all times. Maintaining your innocence now takes one hell of a lot of effort than just not breaking the law. Those who still "insist" on practicing the black magic of religion must repeatedly prove their innocence and even then they risk losing their jobs if anyone finds out they are "pro-religion".
We now put a ballot on the senate floor to license religion and it squeaks by. Sure all the "First Amendment Zealots" and those "ACLU nuts" with their "overly literal translation of the First Amendment meaning freedom of religion is an individual right' and not a collective one" raise the roof, but screw em, we got the votes we needed. We'll shut them up sooner than later. Remember, by degrees.
Only a fool would go after the 1st in its entirety. I didn't tell you that was what I was up to? Oh, well, now you know. You're merely generals, that's why I didn't mention it. No matter, I'll kill you later out of paranoia.
Anyway that's why we start with religion. Speech is not fragmented. You either say something or you don't.
Religion's easy. You've got all those different groups, like hunters versus sports shooters, versus anti-genocide buffs. No one group will defend the other so we can pick them off one at a time. Besides, nobody takes religion seriously anymore. Greed is the new religion and We The People are willing to sacrifice individual freedom for a bit of temporary security.
After we've taught the target market how to concede, we'll ban the right to assemble to petition grievances. Without the right to assemble, they can't very well protest the new license on speech, now can they? But that comes a bit later.
So churches apply for their lawfully required licenses to practice religion. Within six months we have add five new stipulations on the law, including three fee hikes and a real beauty, "to maintain a Religious Practice Permit, you must have an appropriate church front".
Of course we'll put out all sorts of conflicting information about what constitutes an "appropriate church front" and impose massive fines and even jail sentences and that will put about eighty percent of the "extremists" out of business. Now we form a committee. We need a stronger group to oversee the mass of confusion we started and we can petition congress for a budget and if they won't give it to us we'll issue one through the ever-more-popular executive order.
We'll shut congress up soon enough anyway. We've got licensing, a committee, a big budget, of course full backing of the rich media and "the good people with nothing to hide" and very few churches left in existence.
All this will take five years. Not more. Two choices remain, repeal or abolition. We sure as hell didn't do all this work and spend all this tax-payer money and time to repeal. After all, the goal is to bring down the 1st.
The few "zealots" hanging on have no "practical application in modern society" and the cool part is, the harder they fight for their cause at this point, the more fringe and on the edge they seem to be.
We call for the ban of religion because "even though we've made great inroads into curbing the senseless Religious Related Killings plaguing our country and created by the outdated notion of religion, even one Religious Related Killing is more than a civilized society should and can bear." It takes two years and there will always be non-compilers, but they can be dealt with in a very harsh and public manner to discourage mass target market perception reversal. You have to watch this one. We The People is a big bear and we don't want it to turn on us until we've successfully bled it.
The ATF will change the meaning of its acronym from "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms"- two vices and a Constitutional right- to "Alcohol Tobacco and Freedom of Speech".
Religion is now gone and we take on right to peaceable assembly on the grounds that it induces rioting and in five careful years, we overturn it. After our ten year campaign things are coming along nicely and we're ready to go for the keystone, freedom of speech. The fight is a tough one, people love to tell each other how safe they are now that religion is outlawed. But speech is eventually limited to those words which fall under the Non-Threatening Speech Act. Away we go.
And then it happens. Some "zealot", some "extremist" pulls out a firearm and offers to shoot anyone who tries to tell him he can't speak his mind or worship. Everyone gets big ideas, races home, grabs their "assault rifles", "junk guns", "Saturday Night specials" and "Non- Sporting Guns" and goes nuts.
They burn their speech cards in a large rally, the flames can be seen for miles. They burn the ATF Religion Control Headquarters. They vastly outnumber the federal troops who are dispatched to quell them and after the first few shots, the troops realize this is not a bunch of unarmed college students in Ohio, but a well regulated militia and they flee. Pretty soon everyone is out praying and spouting off at the mouth and we're back to square one!
Well that's just great. Now who's going to tell the client, Uncle Sam, that we just lost the target market? Who overlooked the 2nd Amendment, that's what I want to know? Someone will get fired for sure. Ten years of work and spending and fighting and breaking the law and carefully mocking the Constitution all down the drain due to an oversight.
It might as well be 1960 all over again. Now we'll have to start over and this time with an ad man's worst nightmare, a wary target market that thinks for itself.
California, tell me again why I should "register" my firearms? Oh that's right, to "lower crime". Well then, that shouldn't be a problem, after all, I'm a "good citizen" with "nothing to hide." I have one question. If I'm a good citizen with nothing to hide, what's the need to register me, at all?
In America, we don't "register" people. Nazis registered people. Then they burned them.
We The People, sprawling giant, before you agree to register your firearms to your tiny government which you currently control, ask yourself one question, would you register your freedom of speech or your religious beliefs with them? Because it's not your firearms that they are really after like everyone says.
They are after your firearms, but this is incidental. Their ultimate goal is much more severe than that. It is your freedom as humans which they covet, it is your humanity which they will destroy and it is your firearms which are stopping them.
Jim Houck Free, Armed American The Eagle's Nest, California
Now that’s a good piece...