How gun-controllers helped the NRA. And got paid for it...

When Kates and Kleck wrote more than ten years ago on
gun-control, the landscape was quite different:

"...all that the gun lobby needs to do to marshal massive
opposition against gun control proposals is to capitalize on
the terms of the debate established by anti-gun luminaries. 
As one analyst notes, exposure to this debate

'convinces America's handgun owners that they are a hated
minority whose days are numbered by mortal enemies -- 
enemies who hate THEM more than crime.  With the die cast so,
gun owners are made to think that THEY HAVE
EVERYTHING TO LOSE if those who loath them have any success at
all.  [Knowing this, the gun lobby actually]
disseminate[s] the nastier [anti-gun] cartoons and
vituperative op-ed pieces in publications read by gun owners 
to fan the flames of incipient paranoia.'  (emphasis the
author's) 
-- Stell, "Guns, Politics and Reason," 9 J. Am.
Culture 71, 73 (1986)

"The last point is both remarkable in itself and telling
in its implications:  In reprinting anti-gun cartoons, the gun
lobby is
actually paying anti-gun cartoonists royalties for penning
those cartoons!  The money is well spent.

"Essential to mobilizing gun owner opposition is that
they be convinced that every gun control proposal is bottomed
on hatred for them -- that however moderate and reasonable a
control may seem, it is actually only a further step toward
the hatemongers' ultimate goal of banning and confiscating all
guns... Indispensable to gun lobby success is an anti-gun
discourse that convinces gun owners that 'gun control' is not
a criminological imperative but a matter of culturally or
ethically based hatred of them." 
-- Kates and Kleck, The Great American Gun Debate, Pacific
Research Institute for Public Policy, SF, 1997.

                                                
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     The "luminaries" have gone into hiding and the
chief component of the gun-control lobby, MSM, is collapsing. 
The shrill gun-controllers we have on these pages now seem not
only ignorant of their own history, but don't care about that
history, nor, it seems, the issue of crime, "gun
deaths," or even gun control itself.  They are deeply
satisfied to exhibit their righteous hatred toward gun-owners
and continue a losing culture war, identified by scholars
years ago.  One must wonder:  if guns were not the issue, what
would that issue be?