Making A Killing: Guns, Greed And The NRA - Trailer
Brave New Films new feature length documentary, Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, & the NRA exposes how the National Rifle Association and gun lobby profiteers from the current gun violence epidemic -and how they do everything they can to stop common sense reforms.Join us to demand -- and achieve -- common sense gun laws now! SHARE and host a free screening in your community! www.MakingAKilling.com
Posted by Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, & the NRA on Friday, January 29, 2016
Imagine what our lives would look like if for the last several decades, the snack food industry had put a portion of every bag of chips ever purchased into a fund set aside strictly to promote and preserve your personal right to crunch. Over the years, they spent that money advertising, lobbying and funding political candidates, all the time warning the public that the government was trying to take away your right to enjoy pretzels with your football and beer. They stoked fear, claiming that militant health foodies were taking over and that the government was coming to confiscate your Pringles. They appealed to your core values. This isn’t just about the right to Cheez Doodles, but about your God-given right as Americans to put Doritos in your kids’ lunch bags.
Far fetched as this sounds, it’s a pretty much a textbook version of the strategy gun manufacturers’ and sellers’ have been using for decades. In turn, that strategy is why 88 Americans are killed every day with guns. It is the story we tell in Making a Killing: Guns, Greed and the NRA, the latest feature from Brave New Films, which will be released in March.
Sturm, Ruger & Co. donates $2 to the National Rifle Association for every gun sold. Taurus offers a year’s free NRA membership to anyone who buys a gun. Crimson Trace, which makes laser sites, donates 10 percent of its sales to the NRA.
All that money and millions more from similar sources is spent scaring Americans into believing their neighbors are dangerous, their government is out to get them and their values are being threatened.
If, back to our analogy, this had been the snack food industry at work, you wouldn’t see calorie counts or nutritional information on your groceries. Well-paid constitutional scholars would claim that the right to remain ignorant about what you are eating is fundamental to the First Amendment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be barred from studying the health effects of sodium and food additives.
School lunches would be not just allowed but required to serve chips. Frito lovers would buy and hoard cartons of the stuff, just in case. The people who make and sell snacks would make millions.
Instead, it is the gun industry’s cynical marketing machine at work. The result is a set of laws on the books that most Americans oppose, which make it not only possible but easy for anyone, anywhere, anytime, to get their hands on a deadly weapon. Children can shoot other children, unintentionally, because most states have no laws about safely storing guns. Domestic abusers whose guns have been confiscated because they are proven dangerous can easily replace them and return to shoot their families. Young people with a history of mental illness can turn a moving theater into a killing field. The 2 Amendment is bizarrely interpreted to mean that the right to bear arms cannot be balanced against the rest of our rights and freedoms including the right to live safely in our communities.
Marketing is powerful. Marketing, backed by millions of dollars, has been unstoppable. It’s time to connect the dots, untangle the web, recognize the mass manipulation that has been going on for far too long. And it is time to stop it.