Meme Battles

I’m hopping angry at Attorney General Gonzalez and the Bush Administration over this terrorist watch list anti-gun bill.  He might as well have handed the anti-gun groups and the media the rhetorical vise with which to put the screws to us.

Here’s the meme we’re fighting, it’s all over the media:

NRA wants to allow suspected terrorists to purchase guns

Take a look, and you’ll find this everywhere, and it’s incredibly damaging to us.  The reason is because these battles are waged in the public mind through use of memes, and that is a powerful one.  The answer to that is not a meme.  It’s complicated, and difficult to dispense with in a sound bite.

Much of the left, which normally strikes out against the administration for various perceived or real infringements on civil liberties, has embraced this one, since it’s damaging to a core conservative constituency.

How do we fight this meme battle?  How do we make the position that no citizen should be deprived of constitutional rights without due process? How do we make people understand that we don’t want terrorists getting a hold of firearms any more than anyone else in this country does?

I don’t have an answer to this.   And I’m quite getting tired of the media, who are quick to defend liberties they find dear to them, so carefully maligning liberties other people find important, and not even having the courtesy, and actually having the gall, to suggest that our concerns are driven by a desire to arm terrorists rather than legitimate due process and civil liberties concerns.