A Response to David Hogg & Why March for Our Lives Doesn’t Represent the Majority.


When it comes to speaking out on gun rights, I love the opportunity to refute anti-gun propaganda with a deep dive into facts and statistics, but I think for this specific situation, the argument is better made by my close friend and business associate, Chris, who is much closer in age to the subject of this article than I. – Rob.

The Argentinian Philosopher Carlos Bernardo González Pecotche surmised that the world is in turmoil because people don’t know where their thoughts originate. The ideas of others enter their heads, and those people feel like the thoughts are their own. Not realizing that they’ve been programmed.

David Hogg is a professional anti-gun activist and current college student at Harvard. He’s one of the founding members of the March for Our Lives organization, a non-profit that aims to seem like an organic grassroots movement of young people against firearms ownership, which is almost entirely propped up by donations from the top 1% of the country and billionaires like Michael Bloomberg.

Recently, Hogg has been on a tweetstorm, and it’s caught headlines in the firearms media world. Here’s what he had to say:

 

You can practically see the mental pat on the back that he’s giving himself while writing the tweet. But immaturity isn’t necessarily the point here. This is also how Hogg makes his living. Saying ridiculous things on the internet as bait for others to react keeps him from fading into irrelevancy.

I’d like to take a second to address David Hogg and respond to this tweet. I’m assuming that he thinks that he’s speaking for young people in general, or maybe young liberals. Either way, I believe that he’s first wrong to assume he’s in the majority and second, naive to think that people don’t have differing political views from himself—especially young people.

I’m 27 years old. I grew up with Liberal baby-boomer parents and am a product of the early 2000s. I had school shooter drills in high school, bomb threats, and more. I am staunchly pro-gun. Many more people my age are as well. Interestingly, younger people are increasingly opposed to gun control, with the percentage of people under 30 that support stricter gun laws dropping from 65% to 45% since 2018.

Gun owners are incredibly diverse. Young and old, people of all cultures, races, and political opinions own firearms. I’m not sure if there’s anything that supersedes cultural and political divides, like the right to own a gun.

And if the recent surge in gun buying has shown us anything, when the chips are down, and it’s time to take self-defense seriously- people who were once opposed to guns buy guns. We experienced a ton of that firsthand here at TMGN. Nationwide more than 9 million people became first-time gun owners in 2020 and 2021, which continues to rise.

The pandemic, social unrest, the tensions over the 2020 election, and inauguration all brought people closer to their second amendment rights, especially young people.

March for Our Lives is not a grassroots organization. Major million-dollar donations almost entirely fund it. Only 0.5% of their entire revenue is from donations totaling less than $5,000. Some real journalists looked at the group’s 990 tax form showing that out of the $18.6M that March for Our Lives collected in donations during 2018, $17.8M originated from about 74 people donating between $5000.00 and $3,504,717.00.

So, David Hogg would like us to believe that there’s some army of young progressive anti-gun voters out there looking to wipe away these evil old boomers. (Who are some of the most prominent supporters of gun control ironically.) Yet, 78 wealthy donors mainly support his entire organization. (If you dive into the data, 36 donors made donations between $100,000 and $3.5M, so maybe it’s just 36 people who support Mr. Hogg)

David Hogg is just a pawn in a much larger game, though. As long as people are divided and blaming each other for their problems, they won’t look up and see who’s pulling the strings.

Since around 2011, the corporate media have been creating tons of artificial problems for the average person to be upset about to get them fighting with each other. The media has started to pit people against each other based on immutable characteristics like race and gender.

If you don’t believe me here’s a graph of how many times The New York Times mentioned the word “racism” in an article since 1980:

Despite racism being way worse in previous years than it is now, the use of the word in media since 2011 has skyrocketed. The same goes for mentions of “Political Correctness” and many other divisive terms.

What does this all have to do with David Hogg, you may ask? Well, everything. He’s a pawn in a game that he doesn’t understand. One that pits ordinary people against each other for the hope that they’re too preoccupied to realize the standard of living has decreased exponentially over the past few years. One that convinces people to trade their freedoms for the promise of false security.

The idea that gun owners will simply “die out” is false. As millennials get older and start to bear more responsibility in their lives, the right to own a firearm becomes more and more important. The recent gun-buying craze sparked by the pandemic and social unrest has begun to truly express younger Americans, minorities, and women’s Second Amendment rights like never before. These new gun owners are across the political spectrum and suggest that Hogg’s movement is falling into the darkness.

Here’s the thing, since the Heller decision in 2008, gun rights have been rapidly expanding. The landscape isn’t what it was in the 1990s. AR15s are no longer weird quirky firearms that a few hobbyists own, they’re recognized as modern-day muskets. The right to carry a concealed firearm has been expanded greatly since the 1980s, and every day more and more young people get into the sport of shooting and exercise their 2nd Amendment right. David Hogg should come to try firearms for himself; he might just change his mind.