Thread by @opensrcdefense

This piece is a well-executed example of a smart strategy that gun control groups have been running for a few years. We call it “should dressed up as is”. Let’s break it down.

https://twitter.com/newyorker/status/1203701664831737856

How it works: write straight news pieces that flatly state your position is popular, irrespective of what the data says. This forces preference falsification among the laity, who are busy and don’t track the data on what’s empirically popular/unpopular. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferenc…

If you can get momentum on that for a decade or two, the laity will have hidden their true preferences for long enough that they’ll start to forget they ever had true preferences. Especially powerful as new generations come up only hearing the falsified preferences.

Ex. from the piece: “Public support for stricter gun laws is substantial, and growing. This isn’t surprising in a country as haunted as ours is by gun violence.”

In fact, empirically, support for gun control has been dropping ~monotonically for 25 years. opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-right…

Another ex, using the law of small numbers fallacy to suggest that parents are resignedly buying bulletproof backpacks. In fact, obviously, all but a vanishingly small % of parents correctly estimate school shooting as an essentially nonexistent risk to the avg individual child.

Another example, flatly stating as fact that gun laws are increasingly popular. This is an empirical claim and is just flat-out incorrect.

Gun control support rises for ~1 mo after mass shootings and then goes right back to its 25-year monotonic decline. opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-right…

The article then goes into a summary of Heller. (It’s incorrect and misleading in a variety of many-times-debunked ways that are outside the scope of this thread.)

But worth reading the article. Great case study. “Should dressed up as is.” Learn it and you’ll see it everywhere.