by Molly Prince
Constitutional lawyer and New York Times best-selling author Mark Smith combats David Hogg’s rhetoric in his latest book, “#Duped,” which serves as a response to the newly-minted gun-control activist and Parkland graduate’s recently released book, “#NeverAgain.”
Smith exposes the left’s celebration and exploitation of students in order to advance so-called common sense gun control. “#Duped: How The Anti-Gun Lobby Exploits The Parkland School Shooting — And How Gun Owners Can Fight Back” deconstructs the progressive narrative and illustrates how advocates use children to promulgate an agenda that is so unpalatable they have failed to otherwise enact.
Smith writes:
From a political standpoint, children are ideal carriers of messages because they are unassailable, particularly if they have a direct connection to a tragedy. For the gun control movement, children represent a win-win-win. They are sympathetic, they are beyond reproach, and they cannot be challenged by anyone. These factors make children ripe for exploitation and explain why we see so many of them in the media today promoting gun control.”
“#Duped” exposes not just why the anti-gun movement uses children, but also how. Using correspondence within the Obama administration, Smith highlights the parallels between the left’s response to both the Sandy Hook massacre and the Parkland shooting.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff once famously said. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
The tactic has been the same for years. It’s a “repackaging of the same old gun coalition. The messenger is new, but the message is old,” Smith writes.
Smith dives deep into seven common myths about firearms, myths that Hogg helped propagate. Touching on everything from “it’s too easy to buy a gun” to “the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to modern America.”
“You have a choice to make in the battle for gun rights. You can listen to David Hogg and his fellow Parkland survivors … But they are wrong,” he writes.
“At some point you must explain why the particular set of actions you call for will solve the problems you’ve identified. And on that front, the gun grabbers fail. If you want to listen to them, that’s your choice. Just remember, their plan is to take away your right and ability to defend yourself and your family. And once you have given away this right, you will never get it back.”
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Molly Prince is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation. Follow Molly on Twitter.
History evidently isn’t being taught because it’s obvious that citizen disarmament has always been the chief aspect of slavery and tyranny. Also recent history and the government’s own data shows that violent crime and criminal gun deaths have been trending down as more States have enacted more liberal vs. authoritarian gun laws, especially CCW. The one exception is school shootings which became more prevalent after the 1990 Federal Gun Free Schools law sponsored by Sen Joe Biden. There are virtually no mass shootings in places protected by guns. Yet we keep our schools mostly undefended, soft targets. Secure the schools and leave our Bill of Rights alone!
The question is, when these young people reach voting age, will they recognize that they have been manipulated? Or, will they continue on, thinking “poor me”, and vote to ban guns, taking away any chance Americans have of defending themselves from criminals, including governmental ones!
We have been waiting unsuccessfully for many decades for a whole sale break out by African Americans from the “chains” of the urban plantation imposed by Democrat politicians AND many black leaders! I suspect the same will be true regarding these young sheep.
Mao Zedong successfully used the young people of China to overthrow the country in his Cultural Revolution. It could happen in the U.S.