The Ad Council is one of those things that most of us have probably heard of, but few think all that much about. We know about it mostly from the fact that their name is on numerous spots during commercial breaks, talking about all kinds of things, but not selling any products.
It’s fine. Public service announcements are a thing, after all, and while I don’t like private entities being required to air them, some of them hit some important points.
But I really don’t like our tax dollars going into pushing an anti-gun agenda, which is exactly what the NRA’s Institute of Legislative Affairs points out is happening with the Ad Council.
In recent months television viewers have been subjected to a series of anti-gun propaganda pieces produced by the Ad Council. Dubbed the Agree to Agree campaign, the ads typically feature a misleading talking point about “children” and firearms followed by an invitation to go to the Ad Council effort’s website where visitors are bombarded with further gun control agitprop. The website even invites visitors to learn about how to secure red flag gun confiscation orders.
The name might suggest an effort to bridge political disagreements, but the campaign’s list of “stakeholder partners” shows it’s a gun control effort through and through. So-called “stakeholder partners” include: Brady: United Against Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control, Inc.); Giffords (formerly Americans for Responsibly Solutions and the Second Amendment-denying Legal Community Against Violence); Everytown for Gun Safety; and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (named for billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg). Handgun prohibition organization Violence Policy Center is not listed, although their longtime benefactor the Joyce Foundation was involved.
The campaign’s headline factoid is the following: “Gun injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1‑17, surpassing car crashes for the first time in two decades.” To justify the claim, the Ad Council cites a report from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
We’ve talked about these numbers before. Even with them no longer counting 18- and 19-year-olds, they include a lot of older teens who are far more likely to be involved in criminal activity and subcultures that increase the chances of them being shot.
In fact, as the NRA-ILA points out, actual children aren’t being shot at some terrifying rate.
Consider the data on those who may be properly defined as children – ages 0-14. For this cohort, firearm-related injuries are not the leading causes of death and are not higher than motor vehicle deaths. The number of motor vehicle deaths in this age group was more than 40-percent higher than firearm-related deaths in 2023.
This does shift when examining the cohorts ages 15-17, 15-19, or 15-24. Roughly 70-percent of the firearm-related deaths that occur in the 0-17 age group happened among the juveniles ages 15-17 in 2023. This disparity shouldn’t be surprising. The 15-17 cohort is far more often engaged in the type of street crime that can give rise to firearm-related violence and that many jurisdictions have decided to address in a more lenient manner in recent years. The conflation of this age group with young children is even more absurd when one considers that, in the vast majority of jurisdictions, those aged 15 and older can be prosecuted as adults.
Exactly.
These older teens aren’t children as people think of the word representing. These are older youths who have often made the conscious choice to take part in a subculture that sees violence not just as acceptable, but required in numerous instances, including when it looks like someone has shown some degree of disrespect.
They’re being shot, but they’re being shot because of their choices to take part in such a lifestyle. Those who aren’t are usually shot because they’ve somehow associated with someone who has, whether they knew it or not.
The Bloomberg School of Public Health refuses to separate the two categories of young people, all because they exist to push that gun control narrative, and that’s being leveraged in the Ad Council’s effort here.
Yet, as bad as the data is, the fact that our tax dollars go to the Ad Council, all so it can push anti-gun propaganda.
If people on the left want to know why President Trump is dismantling as much of the bureaucracy as he can, this is why. The inner sanctums of bureaucrats and officials who were never elected are using their authority to push a particular agenda that is at odds with what many Americans believe, and they’re doing it without any government oversight.
Here, it’s pushing an anti-gun narrative, but elsewhere it could be any of a million other talking points being pushed as if they’re established fact.
For this reason alone, the Ad Council should be dismantled entirely. I’m sick of working my butt off, paying a whole lot in taxes to a government that will then use some of that money to advocate for a political side that stands for everything I’m opposed to by backing infringements on a constitutionally protected right.
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