Jason Sattler

“Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John as he and 54 other manly men convened in Philadelphia to craft what would become the Constitution.

SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t.

But Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association still want you to “remember the ladies,” especially as you head to the polls in November. That’s the theme of an ad the nation’s largest gun lobby is running for Trump, backed by a $5 million buy split between national cable and rural markets in battleground states.

Remember how vulnerable the ladies are in their dimly lit bedrooms. Remember how shadowy predators assail the ladies as they wait for the police to arrive. Remember how Hillary Clinton wants to sneak into those dimly lit bedrooms and take away all the guns. Wait… what?

You haven’t heard about Clinton’s plan to take away all the guns? Is that because it’s been hidden like Trump’s tax returns or Trump’s wife’s immigration papers or Trump’s investments in Russia?

Nope. Clinton’s gun-grabbing plan only exists in the minds of the people who spent the last seven years insisting that Obama is coming for your guns, as soon as he finishes his next round of golf.

Clinton fed the NRA’s fantasy in Keene, N.H. last October by saying Australia’s mandatory gun buyback program was “worth considering” — a response that politicians on the campaign trail tend to offer voters on any subject from banning gluten to placing sanctions on Narnia. But her casual comment has been translated into no policy proposal whatsoever.

The president made a similar remark about Australia after the 2015 Charleston, S.C. church massacre, mostly expressing his frustration at Congress’ tolerance for mass shootings. But in nearly two terms, he’s largely used his executive powers to strengthen enforcement of existing gun-safety laws. Ironically, the only new gun laws he has signed expand gun rights for national park visitors and Amtrak passengers.

So why does the NRA insist that you imagine a pajama-clad woman in dimly lit peril rendered even more helpless by Hillary Clinton? What’s with the constant fixation on a black man and now a woman stripping you of your phallic weapon? And what would Dr. Freud have to say about this?

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He might slip his cigar out of his mouth and call it a mass castration fantasy.

You don’t have to know anything about Freud to see that the NRA ad relies on the idea that women are helpless victims who need to be armed against hordes of male brutes.

Horrifying home invasions by armed intruders are rare. Still, you can’t deny that this is savvy framing. Any discussion of gun grabbing is always a victory for the NRA.

That’s because the gun lobby doesn’t want to talk about what Clinton is actually proposing. She wants universal background checks, which are typically supported by about 9 out of 10 Americans, including most gun owners, most Republicans and even a few Republican senators. She also wants to keep “military-style” guns off the streets, another idea with majority support in polls.

The NRA ad sidesteps Clinton’s real plan entirely by suggesting, “Hillary Clinton could take away her right to self-defense. And with Supreme Court Justices, Hillary can.”

To believe this, you have to believe that the Democratic nominee was lying when she said at the Democratic convention and on Fox News a few days later that she’s not looking to repeal the Second Amendment. Fact checkers back her up on that.

But fact checking only works if it shames a lie-teller out of spreading a lie. All the Pinocchios and “Pants-on-Fires” in the world have almost no effect on people’s actual beliefs. So forget about making a dent in a fantasy.

Playing up the menace of gun grabbing is a brilliant combined marketing/political strategy. Recent mass shootings have generally been followed by calls for more gun safety regulation, which then almost inevitably lead to more gun sales.

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About 55 million Americans own 265 million guns, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities. The GOP only needed about 43 million votes in 2014 to win the largest House majority since before the Great Depression. But there don’t seem to be enough gun owners to win the presidency.

The number of households that own guns is at a 40-year low, even as sales of firearms continue to grow. The same people seem to be buying more guns. The researchers call the most avid accumulators “gun super-owners.” They’re part “the 3% of American adults who collectively own 130 million firearms, half of the nation’s total stock of civilian guns,” the Guardian’s Lois Beckett explains.

Mostly they’re white men in rural areas, though there are female “super-owners” too. And most of them were probably already planning to vote for Donald Trump even before they were reminded about what Clinton wants to do to the ladies.

Maybe this new ad is designed to get them to the polls. Or maybe it’s designed to get them to buy more guns. When the NRA’s involved, it’s always hard to tell the difference.

Jason Sattler is a columnist for The National Memoand the answer to the obscure trivia question, "Who's the guy who tweets as @LOLGOP?"

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