2005 Volume 2
Lessons in Lobbying
by Dr Richard J Wesson
Introduction
Towards the end of 2004, Gun Free SA’s Adéle Kirsten presented a document called, ”The Role of Social Movements in Gun Control: An international comparison between South Africa, Brazil and Australia.” It was published by the Centre for Civil Society Research; their Report No. 21.
It has been written as an academic document detailing the comparisons between the three most successful anti-gun campaigns in recent years. Hidden within lie pearls of wisdom. These pearls are the secrets of success for a group who is lobbying for a result that was generally misunderstood and unpopular at the start of the campaign. This is a summary of the lessons learnt, distilled down to fundamentals.
Make no mistake, the people and organisations that have, and still are lobbying to take away your right to an effective means of security and defence, have achieved an almost impossible accomplishment. They have done this, using these rules.
There are three basic rules:
1. The start of success occurs with a defining moment. However, defining moments do not just occur, they’re made. And making them occur is hard work.
2. You need the bureaucrats and politicians on your side; i.e. they need to understand that your ideas are to their personal benefit. If they’re not on your side, you get nowhere.
3. Everyone, but everyone must have common purpose. It is essential to have community involvement, and to be associated with like-minded organisations. You must have a message that is generic, and people must be able to associate with it.
1. The Defining Moment
The defining moment is an incident or pretext that you take advantage of. The Australian anti-gunners took advantage of a shooting in Port Arthur as the British anti-gun organisations took advantage of the school shooting of children at Dunblain. The South African anti-gunners (they weren’t yet GFSA) took advantage of a botched hand-in, which they organised, but which got a lot of publicity.
To generate your defining moment, you must have prepared your audience. Your audience is the press and the politicians. Understand this: at this stage they don’t have to agree with you. The press and the politicians do not understand anything that takes more than thirty seconds to explain. And, at this stage your message is not yet politically correct.
Remember, when the defining moment comes the politicians have to be seen to be doing something, anything, to justify their existence. So, politicians re-direct attention to scapegoats and build alibis for themselves. The media has to be seen to be criticising government for allowing the occurrence in the first place. The media also sees this as a defining moment, for them, for a variety of reasons, which explains the feeding frenzy. Calling for cool heads in Editorials does not sell advertising space.
The press and the politicians still do not understand the Firearms Control Act of 2000, yet they support it! Why? Because GFSA spent a lot of time lobbying their ideas in simple mantras before their defining moment. When it came, their mantras were adopted because there was nothing else, and because the mantras were there, and because they sounded reasonable!
The mantras have to be simple and positive; e.g. ’guns don’t kill, people kill’ is a load of rubbish simply because it reinforces the wrong message by using the wording of gun control. Try ’guns save lives!’ Is that not better? If you say something long enough and often enough, people start to believe it!
Don’t always expect your letters or e-mails to be published. However, you must keep on sending them to newspapers, TV newsrooms (especially TV newsrooms) and politicians, every time there’s something on TV, or even just for the hell of it. No letter or e-mail is wasted. You may not get a reply but each letter reinforces the mantra, and the more the merrier. When the defining moment ultimately comes, they will take these as their own (remember, they don’t have any ideas of their own).
Keep on complaining to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of SA (e-mail: complaints@nabsa.co.za) They’ll try to fob you off. They’re biased and lazy, but eventually they’ll come round to your side because they’ll be fed up having to do all the paperwork which you will be generating. As a result, eventually they’ll put a stop to the anti-gun propaganda. If the media believe that they’ve done that because they (the media) are biased, then they’ll slowly start to come round to your views, but at least there won’t be so many anti-gun articles.
A further avenue is to complain to POSLEC SETA’s CEO, Ms Vuyelwa Penxa, (vpenxa@poslecseta.org.za) and
copy to SAQA’s, Mr. D. Phuthing,
(dmphuthing@saqa.co.za)
every time a Designated Firearms Officer, Central Firearms Register or its call centre acts in a wrongful manner, or if any person is ignorant of the Law or his/her duties, or if they are less than helpful.
The Independent Complaints Directorate (Independent Complaints Directorate
Tel: 012 - 320 0431) (http://www.icd.gov.za/) appears to have a history of ignoring police wrongdoings when related to firearms and the public.
However, complaints along the POSLEC SETA/ SAQA route are education and labour department related; poor functioning of unit standards and especially unfairness is strongly disapproved of, by SAQA.
So, complain, complain, and complain again!
When the defining moment occurs, as usual, the politicians and bureaucrats will have no idea what to do. They will grasp the first (only?) new reasonable idea. The media will support the idea if they think they understand it, or at least if it has been bouncing around in their skulls long enough. ”It must be true because everyone keeps on saying it.”
Unless they have been given a new mantra, the standard response is, ”although it isn’t working, there’s nothing else, so we must have more of the same.” If you don’t want this to happen when the authorities realise that violent crime is rising as a direct result of the FCA 2000 or because of a massacre in a gun-free zone, you must start informing them (and keep informing them) of the truth now! Firearm murder rates in Brazil have risen as a direct result of firearm legislation, but because no one has shown the correlation, the authorities are considering a total gun ban; i.e. because there’s no alternative, let’s have more of the same!
People who are against violence and want the means to protect themselves and their families from it are NOT PC. The mantras must ALWAYS be based on fact / truth and they must ALWAYS be based on protecting people, especially women and children, from violence; NOTHING AGGRESSIVE!
GFSA have always been considered as nice white liberal ladies; no one would ever consider that they are fraudulent with their facts, that they have a hidden agenda or that they’re acting counter to the aspirations of sister organisations, but you will never be taken on trust.
The mantras must all appeal to emotion or be designed to invoke an emotional response. -- Gun control kills, register criminals not gun owners, reward the law abiding, punish the criminals, crime control not gun control, nobody rapes a .38 special.
Remember you will not see the effect of your actions, letters, e-mails, phone calls, FAXs etc. That does not mean that there has been no effect, just that they don’t want to admit it or that they’ve been wrong. You’ve just got to keep on hammering away and then one day, without warning you’ll start to see the results.
2. How to get the politicos and bureaucrats on your side
Politicos and bureaucrats are there for status, power and to lap up the cream. These servants (?) of the people need a reason to support an initiative or to change direction, or even to reverse their direction. And they need a reason that does not make them look stupid. Good reasons are: the anti-gun cliques faked the data, they had a hidden agenda, etc., etc.
They want a monopoly of power, which is why they supported the FCA 2000. But they like their jobs and they want to keep them. So you need to tailor an argument that they understand and which affects them directly.
Sub-consciously, passengers on the gravy train don’t care about Joe Public, their supporters, crime, people’s rights or anything else. They’re only interested in themselves; philanthropy, compassion, forget it! Their sub-conscious is not interested in logic, fairness or the Constitution. The argument has to be directed towards themselves, their personal safety and their interests.
It doesn’t have to be directed towards increasing their benefits, e.g. GFSA’s argument that the FCA 2000 shall give them a monopoly of power. It only has to show that what they’re currently doing will cause them extreme harm or loss of money/status. And that your idea(s) shall at least ensure that they’ll keep what they’ve already got and that it will maintain their safety. (Is it worth getting something small, only to lose everything, including your life, because of that small advantage?)
Publicly, they won’t say that this is the reason why they’ll stop supporting the FCA 2000, but if you say the mantra often enough, in a manner which only they hear, not to the media (e.g. by e-mail or letter direct to directors general and politicos, especially ANC politicos at all three tiers of government,) they should start to take notice. Otherwise if it’s made public, they MUST reject it. These are all members of the party; but if enough members start whispering an idea, it becomes policy. Maybe unofficial policy, but policy nonetheless and when the defining moment comes, the remainder soon change if there is no other choice/ option/ ideas.
Remember that just as in the case of publicly generated mantras, you must continue to only state the truth or reasonable projections; no fictions! You’re not GFSA; they won’t trust you, so you have to be able to back everything up if they ask for proof. Eventually, they’ll start to realise that they can’t disprove what you’re saying.
And of course the cops; they need to be informed that more and more of them are going to be murdered as a direct result of the FCA 2000. It’s already started, the murders that is, so that should get their attention.
To reiterate: remember you will not always immediately see the effect of your actions, letters, e-mails etc. That does not mean that there has been no effect, just that they don’t want to admit that they’ve been wrong. You’ ve just got to keep on persevering.
Part 2 of this article will follow in our next edition. Richard is the author of Conditioned Victim.