ABSTRACT
Recently, my middle-school-age son Owen and I were searching YouTube for an online player game he is fond of. It’s vaguely military, so the search terms involved some gun terminology. During our searches, an ad appeared in between videos. An attractive woman is talking. She’s looking right at us through the screen and repeating a warning about some people she repeatedly calls “They.” She’s calm, but fierce. The world she’s speaking from is dark and ominous. She doesn’t say who “they” are, but they are doing bad things—and they are all around us. They ‘assassinate’ truth; they teach children bad things and lies; they take away our freedoms. It’s a world of gray and black and white, of imagery of riots and civil unrest, of people out of control, people trying to take away our traditional way of life. They’re not like us. But, thankfully, there’s a solution. The narrator continues: “We need to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth,” she says. The screen goes to white, and a large “join us today” appears on the screen, followed by a clickable National Rifle Association link underneath (National Rifle Association, 2017).
