6. The Big Lie, or Don't Believe Everything You Read

``NO MATTER HOW THIN YOU SLICE IT, IT'S STILL BALONEY.'' New York
Governor Alfred E. Smith, speech, 1936.

	Handgun Control, Inc. knows how effective pro-rights
grassroots lobbyists are. That's why HCI has invented a special
campaign, ``Operation Alienate,'' designed to drive gun owners away
from the NRA and other pro-rights organizations. What HCI hopes is
that if you read enough negative information about the right to bear
arms and its supporters, you'll stop working to defend your rights.

	In fact, much of the anti-gun ``information'' you read in the
press is really disinformation--falsehoods invented by the anti-gun
lobbies, and thoughtlessly repeated by the media.

	The problem of media disinformation is not limited to the gun
issue. During the Persian Gulf War, University of Massachusetts
sociologists Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan tested
people for their knowledge of important facts about the conflict (e.g.
knowledge that Kuwait was not a democracy). The authors found that the
more television people watched, the less they knew. That is, after
controlling for other variables, the study discovered that people who
watched a lot of television coverage of the war knew less about the
war than people who watched only a little television.

	In the gun issue, who's telling the truth. The NRA and Handgun
Control, Inc. both accuse each other of being fundamentally dedicated
to dishonesty. At least one of the two organizations must be lying
quite a bit. Here's what Library Journal said in its Sept. 15, 1988
``Alarums and Diversions'' column: ``A highly placed library source in
Washington, D.C. told A&D that the American Library Association lobby
and the National Rifle Association lobby are the only ones whose
information was considered consistently truthful and reliable by
legislators.''

	So before you let some hysterical article in the national
media drive you out of the guns rights movement, take the latest
anti-gun screed with a big grain of salt.