Op-Ed: Dumbing Down UC Davis

When a researcher’s opening remarks are a demonstrable lie, you tend to disbelieve everything they say afterward.

So naturally we are discussing Garen Wintemute, the stoat-faced director of UC Davis’ Violence Prevention Research Program.

To create a false controversy in an effort to generate attention for Wintemute’s latest alleged research effort, a few news organizations (I stumbled across the item at Al Jazeera’s English language web site) have claimed the NRA attempted to prevent Wintemute from conducting a survey of gun retailers. Ignoring media finger pointing and hyperbole, two of Wintemute’s quotes are worth repeating for the sake of satanic propaganda studies.

Wintemute said he never received any money from anti-gun groups. “I’ve turned it down, in fact.”

Odd then that the press release announcing his latest work says “Initial planning also was supported in part with a grant from the Joyce Foundation.”

Anyone who has been awake these past few decades knows that the Joyce Foundation – Barack Obama’s ex-employer – is the bank for America’s gun control movement, tossing money to every anti-gun collation from the Violence Policy Center, to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, to billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Joyce’s long-standing anti-freedom objectives are well-known to Wintemute. So we can assume his disclaimer lies somewhere between misleading and fraudulent.

But it gets better (or worse depending on how much snake oil you can stomach). In the next paragraph Wintemute doubles down by saying:

“The positions taken by the leadership of the [NRA] organization don’t represent NRA members.”

Anyone who has read my three part series deconstructing the new gun control marketing playbook knows that one of the primary talking points the book makes is to drive a wedge between NRA members and NRA leadership. They created this false division because polls show the NRA is now a well-liked organization considered mainstream by the public. The playbook was an insider’s document, distributed within anti-gun circles as a means to coordinate their media outreach. Wintemute is aping the artificial divide between NRA members and NRA leadership … straight from that playbook.

So to recap, Wintemute benefits from anti-gun money, misleads folks about it, and then echoes talking points from an anti-gun insider playbook.

Click here to read the entire op-ed at CalGunLaws.com.