Cartoon demonization of gun
owners recalls an earlier target
By David Codrea, February 20th 2015
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
At first, the US News & World Report feature looked like a hopeful development, at least based on its title: “Gun Control and Gun Rights Cartoons.” Perhaps here would be a place within the mainstream where the right to keep and bear arms would get equal time, with issues and truths explored through insightful art, rather than the typical ad hominem hatred some of us have come to expect from personal experience.
You have to understand, my view is admittedly jaundiced, after having been condemned by the 
Coalition to Secure State Violence (that name makes more sense than the one they use) over my response to an “editorial cartoon.” My “crime” was publicly reminding syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall that some of us would resist being “bundled off to Bagram” if civil rights were suspended and we were declared “enemy combatants.” Naturally, the CSSV had to lie about what I was replying to, which I pointed out for all to see, and which may explain why the link to that page on their website has disappeared.
Curiously, such a removal of inconvenient realities is, in itself, a “time-honored” totalitarian practice.
But back to the Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists at US News— if I had any notions their treatment would offer a fair and balanced point/counterpoint presentation, they were quickly set straight by the sheer overwhelming volume of rabidly anti-gun posts. And it’s not just that they were anti-gun, they were lying anti-gun, blaming a convenient NRA punching bag for happily profiting from heinous acts, and portraying gun owners as fat, homicidal maniac hicks, devoid of all rationality and human worth.
This is an exhibit of pure bigotry. It’s every bit as evil and offensive as blood libel, and its done for the same purpose.
It could be argued that cartoons, of necessity, present stereotypes, but these all seem rooted in the prejudices of “sophisticated progressives,” who let no opportunity pass to portray gun owners as “Deliverance” cast members. That is, until they want to lull “sportsmen” into thinking they’re respected partners in “common sense gun safety,” like when Michael Bloomberg’s professional illusion machine wanted to fraudulently establish “Average Joe” solidarity in its divide and conquer campaign against gun owners.
Perhaps it’s just that -- for all their talk of egalitarian inclusiveness and tolerance -- Opposite Day urban-dominated “progressives” with liberal arts degrees have convinced themselves they’re superior to people who actually know how to do useful things, like keeping them fed, and keeping the roads running and the lights on. There appears to be a genuine loathing of all that is rural or “working class” by these supposed champions of the proletariat. In any case, the de-humanizing and demonizing of gun owners is calculated, and it recalls an earlier time when another group that found itself the target of disarmament and worse, also found itself portrayed in such an ugly manner, by those sharing ideological commonalities with modern statists. That Nazi political cartoons were used to promote public acceptance for attacking Jews is a matter of shameful historical record. That modern day “progressives” continue that hateful practice is a matter of shameful documented fact.
At the risk of having someone who wishes to obscure the truth scream “Godwin’s Law! ” -- as if that invalidates bringing up the subject of Nazi similarities in any discussion (it doesn’t, it merely references probability, not validity) -- the truth is, while “progressives” like to call “conservatives” Nazis, “Hitler ... was, at heart, a left-winger.” As much as they understandably try to keep from owning it, latter day “national socialists” demanding federal control über alles, are the movement’s ideological heirs, and it is from that “monopoly of violence” fanaticism that we come to the black heart of what they would enable.
Noting the use of cartoons to dehumanize is not something that just struck me, by the way—I’ve commented on it before. No less a “mainstream” outlet than The Los Angeles Times used a similar technique several years back in an editorial cartoon comparing NRA members to cockroaches, prompting me to comment in a blog post titled “Are you vermin?”
“Those who would rule have mastered the time-proven technique that if you dehumanize a segment of society you wish to eliminate, you can treat them inhumanely without a general outcry,” I noted.
But unlike earlier victims of such evil propaganda, we men and women who would be free possess the means to resist what the control cult would visit on us if they could. We have guns. And we intend to keep them.
David Codrea is a field editor at GUNS Magazine, penning their monthly "Rights Watch" column. He provides regular reporting and commentary at Gun Rights Examiner and blogs at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. David Codrea's Archive page.
