Publisher's Synopsis
"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." "An armed society is a polite society." "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." We've all heard these slogans time and again. The result of a targeted marketing effort by the NRA and other pro-gun organizations, these catchphrases have come to define the contemporary gun control debate. Former Brady Center Vice President Dennis Henigan explodes the misguided thinking at the heart of these pro-gun slogans and dissects their deadly impact on US gun policy in this completely revised and updated edition of his much praised 2009 hardcover (which has never been published in paperback).The gun lobby's remarkable success infiltrating these catchy slogans into the gun control lexicon has allowed them to block lifesaving gun legislation for decades. Their unprecedented influence on American politics has gained the NRA extraordinary power in the Republican Party and has largely dissuaded Democratic Party leaders from taking the political risk of tackling gun control. In this well-researched but accessible book, Henigan takes the NRA's myths to task and exposes the fallacious thinking behind the gun lobby's bumper sticker logic.