I’m trying to think of a term, maybe you can help me because I’m drawing a blank.
During the morning walkie/sniffathon, I was listening to a podcast discussing myths related to the latest gungrabber hobgoblin, “ghost guns.” And while waiting for Tobie to finish reading peemail I tried to construct a mental list of all the labels I can recall that have been used at one time or another for the purpose of keeping the populace clamorous to be led to safety through helplessness. This list is certainly not complete, my memory being what it is lately…
Saturday Night Specials
Semiautomatic pistols
Deadly sniper rifles
Concealable guns
Machine guns
High capacity magazines
Assault weapons
Weapons of war
And now, of course, ‘ghost guns.’
And where I hit a mental roadblock was trying to recall the blanket term for this sort of rhetorical device. I’m sure there’s a phrase for it, but I’m hitting a total blank. Anybody help me out?
I have a saturday night special on my nightstand … you have an “assault rifle” … Ian has some machine guns and high cap. mags … hunters and target shooters have very accurate rifles … when up at my rural land concealed carry is wise … lets call them non-felony guns!
stalking horse
Stalking horse has my memory addled vote.
Don’t forget “cop killer bullets”!
Lying.
scary black guns
Aargh! That was a big one. I also forgot “gun show loophole.”
Army Rifle 15
Black swan
The original term was “niggertown Saturday night special”, before it was bowdlerized. I’m told it was cop slang for those shitty sidearms, as dangerous to the shooter as to the person they were aimed at.
I have one, a “Clerke 1st”-brand .32 revolver my Dad bought at a bar sometime in the ’70s. I keep it to show folks whom I know well what an actual “Saturday night special” really was, and I wouldn’t squeeze that trigger on a bet. Just picking it up, you can feel how shitty the steel(?) is.
Gone Guns.
“Stalking horse” doesn’t feel right. It has its roots in deception, but wasn’t designed to scare or frighten the target at all, in fact, quite the opposite.
Possibly, the right term briefly flitted into my head, but got replaced by “stalking horse”. Alas! Bugaboo?
Atrocity propaganda?
Don’t forget, “pocket rocket.”
Shibboleth.
I always thought of a saturday night special as a basic revolver…mine is a 5 shot 38 special … I have fired it lots of times ( at targets ) …it is fairly accurate at 50 ‘ and is not made of cheap steel… never had a problem with it ! The thought of a gun made so poorly that it could injure its’ user is scary… I’m not a gun collector so I have never seen anything like that…might be a good article for Ian , Patrick
False Firearms ?
Scare/fear-mongering?
These days “clickbait” sorta applies.
I initially (and almost immediately) thought of Deodand, but given that a Deodand is ‘surrendered/sacrificed’ to an ‘authority’ after the fact, Bane seems to be a more accurate word
straw man argument?
No one needs Military grade weapons. And the stock thing that goes up.
I think they call those “barrel shrouds.”
I thought it was a “shoulder thingy that goes up”? Except the way they described it, it sounded more like a flip-up grenade launcher sight, not a folding stock.
Don’t forget the bayonet lug, and the sooper scary chainsaw bayonet! Another gun-grabbers’ boogeyman.
Shibboleth?
A similar term from the tech industry is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt).
sound like dogwhistles to me… I was going to say “package deal” but that usually implies at least one non-pejorative item in the set and these are all loaded terms (yes it’s a pun).
demagoguery? Demagogue?
Scaremongering?
Y’all forgot ” plastic guns”. remember you could just go through a metal detector with a Glock…..