In The Culture War On Guns, Maybe It’s Time To Fight Fire With Fire

By Tom Knighton

While the debate over gun laws rages in the halls of Capitol Hill, in statehouses throughout the nation, and on the digital battlefield known as social media, there’s another gun war taking place. This one is in American culture itself.

A while back, I talked about the attempt to stigmatize the American gun owner. Since then, I’ve touched on other examples. All of these exist in an effort to try and make it so even if it’s legal to own a gun, it’s socially taboo. If that happens, then no one will talk about the Second Amendment either because they don’t want to be labeled as “pro-gun.”

But there’s another side to that, and that’s by making the anti-gun side seem to be the mainstream movement, not a radical effort to curtail someone’s civil liberties.

How does this happen? Well, when a brand targeting an impressionable but often under-informed demographic puts their politics front and center, it sends a signal that this is a normal, acceptable position and not part of a larger debate.

The teen-age activists caught the attention of American Eagle Outfitters, a 40-year-old youth-oriented clothing brand that is outpacing similar retailers and …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms