Sexist Bloomberg Gun Control Ad Unintentionally Makes A Case For Gun Ownership

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The latest frightful television ad from Everytown for Gun Safety — the new iteration of Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group — features an angry man bursting through his ex’s door to shoot the mother and haul away their toddler son. 

Giving fresh credence to the evergreen saying that, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, the unarmed woman in the video reaches for the phone to call 911. That’s not exactly stopping power, so the guy shoots her anyway — fade to black.

That’s obviously not the message Everytown was trying to send when it published the video on Monday. “Tell Senator [fill in the blank]: Stop gun violence against women.” 

That’s the message Everytown was going for; it’s the one that takes over the screen as the bad guy fires the gun. It’s an ambiguous message, and the Internet wasted no time in pointing out that the woman in the ad was, herself, the best hope in this scenario for stopping the “gun” violence against her.

“The video by Everytown for Gun Safety is intended to show the dangers of guns in the hands of domestic abusers,” wrote MyFox New York Wednesday, “but the victim, a woman, is seen helpless because she has no gun to protect herself.”

The four female co-hosts of ABC’s daytime talk show “The View” spent some time talking about the ad Tuesday, and, remarkably, three of them walked away from the piece with a different perspective than Everytown intended: “Get a gun in your home!” as co-host Sherri Shepherd put it.

Here’s Shepherd after viewing the ad:

The flipside is when I was at my home and the alarm went off, and I ran to my son’s bedroom and Jeffrey was crying, and I realized all I had to protect me and somebody coming around that corner was a daggone wicker trash basket. And I said to myself and everybody said to me, “well get a bat.” You got one chance to use a bat and if they take it away — “Get pepper stray.” You know how close they got to get to you, if you use pepper spray? You got one of these? [makes a gesture like she’s holding a gun and makes a sound of cocking a gun] They’re not gonna come near you and your child! So when you’re standing there, and you don’t know how to protect your child? Get a gun in your home!

Hosts Jenny McCarthy and Juliet Huddy shared similar experiences from their own lives that led them to the same conclusion. ABC’s Lara Spencer played the odd woman out, insisting that guns are too dangerous to keep in a home with children. Both McCarthy and Shepherd told Spencer, “I used to think like you.”

The other noteworthy thing about the Bloomberg ad — and it’s a feature common to much progressive propaganda that seeks to level the playing field by taking away freedoms and opportunities — is its implicit sexism, as well as its implicit assumption that people are passive victims until the state comes to their rescue. 

“Stop gun violence against women.” If — when confronted by a snorting, irrational man who lacks the character to check his own proclivity to use muscle against her — an unarmed woman is indeed the weaker creature, then a gun is exactly what places her on equal physical ground. And it allows her to be an active agent in determining the safety of herself and her family. Isn’t that a message worth sending?

YouTube user Dan Troop, commenting on The Washington Free Beacon’s posting of the segment, summed it up nicely:

Looks like Bloomberg ignored an important consideration — women aren’t as dumb as he thinks they are. This PSA will, if anything, convince women that the only protection and defense they can count on is self-protection and self-defense and that the best tool for that job is a firearm.

Personal Liberty

Ben Bullard

Reconciling the concept of individual sovereignty with conscientious participation in the modern American political process is a continuing preoccupation for staff writer Ben Bullard. A former community newspaper writer, Bullard has closely observed the manner in which well-meaning small-town politicians and policy makers often accept, unthinkingly, their increasingly marginal role in shaping the quality of their own lives, as well as those of the people whom they serve. He argues that American public policy is plagued by inscrutable and corrupt motives on a national scale, a fundamental problem which individuals, families and communities must strive to solve. This, he argues, can be achieved only as Americans rediscover the principal role each citizen plays in enriching the welfare of our Republic.