Forget Lock And Load; The NRA Is All About Lock And Lie

The NRA is lying again, this time about Secretary Clinton. And while most people will notice the base lie in their latest advertisement -- the whole "she'll take away your guns" trope -- there is another lie that will get less attention. This lie -- hidden in a fear-mongering, transparent attempt to attract women to vote for a blatant misogynist -- is that the NRA cares in the slightest about safety -- anyone's safety. We have done a video to correct it.

The lie is embodied in a little-commented-on moment in the ad when the woman unlocks the safe in which her gun is stored. In state after state, the NRA has fought with all it had against legislation that would require gun owners to store their weapons safely -- as in, locked away from the curious eyes of children. One of those states was Washington where in 2013, the NRA managed to kill an attempt to mandate safe storage. One year later, Sandy Aponte's son, Eddie, was killed by another child unintentionally when the boys got a hold of a loaded gun another friend's stepfather left laying around. Sandy's story is one of those we tell in Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA. The film traces the connection between gun company profits and the NRA.

Those profits are amplified by the NRA's marketing strategy which can be summed up as "keep em' scared." That is why they have fought mandatory safe storage. The line they use is that people need to be able to get their guns quickly when someone is, say, breaking into their home. That's a terrifying thought - one that is far more likely to encourage people who are so inclined to rush out and buy a weapon than "guns should be stored safely away from children, who are extremely likely to shoot themselves or someone else accidentally if they are not."