Guns and Soundbites: How the NRA Out-Messages the Gun Control Movement

So if the right to bear arms is not to be infringed, shouldn’t it extend to handheld grenade launchers and small missiles? How about nuclear arms? After all, nuclear weapons don’t kill people, people kill people. And if we outlaw nukes, only outlaws will have nukes.
 
This example is what lawyers call reductio ad absurdum—taking an argument that seems logical and extending it to the extreme. The “slippery slope” argument favored by those in the pro-gun community mimics this by claiming that acceptance of one fact leads inevitably to its extreme—e.g., if you take away my ability to buy an assault weapon with a large-capacity magazine, it’s just the first step down a path to eliminating private, legal ownership of firearms altogether.
 
Which brings me to a broader point regarding the resonance of messages (some communications theorists call it the “stickiness” of messages). I just paraphrased three very well-known arguments of the pro-gun rights lobby, off the top of my head, with relative ease.

Can I do the same for the pro-gun control movement? Absolutely not. And that’s my point.
 
Yes, the National Rifle Association is a well-organized lobby with lots of money. They reward politicians who vote for positions they advocate and punish those who do not. But in the end, I believe the success of the pro-gun rights movement over the past decade or so has much to do with the lack of a coherent, well-structured message to counteract the simple but compelling arguments outlined by gun rights advocates.

Simply put, pro-gun forces communicate in ways that resonate, while anti-gun forces do not. As I have mentioned in this column in the past, a message not heard is no message at all. This unavoidable truth is sometimes difficult for advocates who deal in substance and depth on a day-to-day basis to understand.
 
So when NRA EVP Wayne LaPierre gives a full-length press conference in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, shootings, he skillfully offers up a soundbite like, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” and lays out a simple proposal like putting armed police officers in every school—and that is all the general public hears or remembers.

The true believers in the gun control movement—who watched his press conference live and devoured every second—see LaPierre as a nut. But those aren’t the people you need to convince. Most of us only watched snippets of his comments on the evening news, or read them in newspapers, or had them passed to us via social media. So soundbites are all that get through. And in this case they are memorable, succinct, and personalize the message—that is, they speak not in terms of facts and statistics but answer the elemental question: What is at stake for me?