PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Exclusive: Mad Men :: 08/10/2015
“Ad of the Day: Here’s What Happens When You Open a Gun Store in the Middle of NYC,” Adweek contributor Tim Nudd reported to industry shakers, movers, opinion-molders and manipulators.
The influential trade publication reaches everybody who’s anybody in the advertising world, and they look to it for client/agency news, technology and trends. As gun owners have been increasingly seeing, those include “AstroTurf” attacks on the right to keep and bear arms embedded in slick, professionally-crafted propaganda campaigns masked as “public service announcements.”
“States United to Prevent Gun Violence and its agency, Grey New York, have teamed up for some truly hard-hitting PSAs,” Nudd advised. “Now, they’ve moved on to … a social experiment set in the real world. They … opened a real-looking gun store … and invited first-time gun buyers to check it out, with hidden cameras rolling.
“[T]hey put disturbing tags on each weapon, indicating which models were used in particular mass shootings, unintentional shootings, homicides and suicides.” Nudd elaborated. “[T]he fresh-faced buyers end up looking rather pallid by the end, and aren’t quite as excited to head home with a firearm.
“[I]t does, at least, suggest—indeed, demonstrate—that minds can be changed on the matter,” Nudd insisted. “And it’s chilling in the video to see the actual guns that were used in notorious crimes, and must have been that much more so in person.”
The guy swallowed it hook, line and sinker, didn’t he? Even after being told the setup was a fake, this media “professional,” who immerses himself for a living in the stuff that dreams are made of, accepted without question that the rest of the illusion must be real—because, after all, it was a public service announcement. Besides, who’s ever known an advertising agency to stretch the truth?
In a way, it shows how ignorant even seemingly tuned-in and intelligent people can be about the gun issue when they view traditional American culture as alien. So assuming his naiveté isn’t an act, it never occurred to Nudd—or to the millions of others who have watched the spot since it was first released last March and who only know what “journalists” publicizing the PSA as “news” parrot for them—to ask some basic questions? Because like everything else SUPGV (a.k.a. Ceasefire USA) does, it’s basically smoke and mirrors.
To begin with, the grandiose name for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has never prevented one act of “gun violence” hardly reflects reality—their 2013 IRS Form 990 shows them being “C/O Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence” and taking in just over $147K. Filings after that one will probably show an uptick in revenues due to more “public service” messages, such as the one where Snoop Dogg (or Snoop Lion, or whatever convicted “gun criminal” and rapper Calvin Broadus is calling himself these days) dispensed gun company stock “unloading” advice without disclosing his investment counseling qualifications. But back to their latest work of fiction…
Sure, we knew the “gun shop” was a fake, a set inside a vacant storefront staffed by a professional crew. We knew the “gun store proprietor was a fake—he’s an actor, best known up until now for doing character voice work in “Grand Theft Auto V,” a game that, per The Washington Post, is “so violent and graphic that Kmart and Target yanked it from stores in Australia.”
That the “guns” were also fakes should have been a given, not only from the way the “customers” on “hidden camera” invariably broke Col. Cooper’s rule about keeping fingers off triggers, but from a basic awareness of draconian edicts in New York City. For one thing, buyers can’t handle the merchandise without first obtaining a permit.
That Nudd, his readers, and supposedly, the “customers” believed the tags describing crimes each gun was used in were real, is worthy of a forceful face palm. No one questioned why the seized Sandy Hook massacre gun was being offered in a retail establishment to “first time buyers”? Really?
That’s because, like the shop, and the proprietor, and the guns, and like States United/Ceasefire, the customers were also fakes. We now can prove what most of us suspected because of my Freedom of Information Law request with the Mayor’s Office of Media that yielded copies of the production permits.
“Actors are interviewed on camera in a fake gun store,” the permits’ scene descriptions reveal.
In an email to PJTV, States United insisted they were “persons selected from a focus group by a marketing research firm.” How such persons were identified and selected as suitable—or rejected—is not disclosed, nor is it clear if there are any outtakes that didn’t make the final cut.
It’s obvious this was done to try and make people believe anti-gun arguments are compelling and persuasive, and “official” media outlets were happy to help spread that impression. In typical “progressive” Opposite Day fashion, the only thing that really needs to be debunked in the “hidden camera social experiment to debunk gun safety myths” is the myth created by the gun-grabbers.
There’s also the matter of the guns themselves.
“The firearms in question were inspected by the NYPD on site and verified to be props, not real guns, so therefore no permit was required,” the press secretary for the NYC film office replied in response to my request for documentation of the replica guns used in the production. If that’s the final word, that means hundreds of otherwise illegal replicas can be transported and transferred without inventory accountability records, a prospect that hardly seems consistent with special theatrical permit requirements mandated for NYC prop gun dealers.
That’s a concern, especially since an earlier investigation I did on yet another anti-gun “PSA” proved permissions were not secured for a replica gun brought into a charter school in Oakland, Ca. It’s curious how people demanding more “gun laws” seem comfortable violating existing ones when it advances citizen disarmament goals. And it’s more than disturbing when authorities, who would bust you and me in a New York minute, turn a deliberately indifferent and intentionally blind eye to that, as exemplified by the official yawn after David Gregory of Meet the Press waved an “illegal” magazine around while interviewing NRA’s Wayne LaPierre in NBC’s Washington, D.C. studio.
“I happen to think that Stop Gun Violence is the best gun PSA I have ever seen,” Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser (see Rights Watch, July 2014: “Gun Control’ Messages Evolve”) gushed in his The Huffington Post column about the Oakland video. Likewise, the only problem he had with the fraudulent “social experiment” video is with a complaint filed by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association asking the state attorney general to ensure that all applicable laws were observed.
Perhaps that’s to be expected. After all, the self-described “retailer, wholesaler, importer and firearms trainer [and] NRA Life member” is part of Evolve, the self-described “third voice in the gun debate,” that employs advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi to help with all those voices. They produced still another “PSA” in which they thought it would be appropriate to gin up fear of guns by filming children “sword fighting” with …umm… I can’t say it in this magazine, but they found the “toys” in their mother’s bedroom drawer.
Allowing professional spinmeisters to define our rights is mad. So is allowing those with political ambitions to deny them.
By David Codrea
