Could “Gun Control” Activists Use Better Marketing?

You would think that with the slaughter of 19 kids in their school in Uvalde, Texas, a heart-broken nation would recoil in horror and give up its guns. But that hasn’t happened and with the road the nation is on, it is unlikely to. So, what gives?

As we commiserated about this latest tragedy, one of my dear friends turned to me and asked, “What do you think we could do? You’ve just written a book on marketing and consumer psych, for cryin’ out loud, what would you do? Why is aren’t people listening? Why don’t they change? Why isn’t this enough?”

“It’s hard. It’s very hard!” I replied weakly, “They have tried everything.”

But later I thought, have they really? Are we missing something?

Now, to be clear, the book[i] my friend was referring to is not at all about public policy or gun control. Rather, it is to help marketers use new techniques to influence consumers to buy their brands and message, applying recent research from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral science.

And now my friend was asking if those insights could help us dig our way our of this terrifying countrywide predicament?

It is hard and I don’t really know. But you have to start somewhere and so here are some thoughts.

Don’t let people be bystanders. Make it personal.

Gun control activists haven’t been idle. They are spending a lot of money on campaign donations to influence political candidates into enacting effective firearm safety laws. Most of this is to democrats, who on their own can pass no legislation. Yet, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a republican candidate can win a primary while being anti-gun. They would lose at least 15–20% of the vote to their pro-gun rival and that in most cases would be enough to sink their candidacy.

Thus, it may make more sense to shift the spending directly towards citizens rather than candidates and attempt to change their minds about who they vote for.

In the field of psychology, there is something called the “bystander effect.” It says that people are less likely to personally help someone in distress if they feel that others around them will do the needful.[1] With gun control, a little of that is going on. We all gape incredulously at all the school shootings around the country on television, but ultimately, we do nothing, hoping that…