“I’m a gun owner, but…”

Those are the words that make a lot of us roll our eyes. We know that immediately following the “but” will be some insane call for gun control that will have no impact on crime but will create real issues for law-abiding gun owners. Of course, we call these people Fudds, named after Elmer Fudd, but that’s probably not very fair. Elmer never did anything to us.

However, the Fudds are an annoyance. They give ammunition to anti-gunners and allow them to delude themselves into believing that gun owners really side with them.

Now, it seems one group is trying to weaponize Fudds, and the NRA is ready to call them out over it.

Divide et impera; divide and rule; divide and conquer. For millennia political actors have understood that one of the most effective means of defeating your enemy is to divide them and set the component parts against each other. For what seems nearly as long, gun control supporters have sought to separate gun owners from their rights by using this strategy.

The civilian disarmament industry’s latest attempt to split gun owners comes courtesy of Giffords. In recent weeks, the group has been promoting its newly-concocted and misleadingly-named state “Gun Owners for Safety” groups. For those unfamiliar with the gun control movement’s perpetual rebranding schemes, Giffords is a combination of the gun control groups Americans for Responsible Solutions and the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which was previously named the Legal Community Against Violence (LCAV).

According to the materials for the Minnesota “Gun Owners for Safety” franchise, the “group” consists of “gun owners who support commonsense gun safety laws.” The document focuses on three of these so-called “commonsense” measures.

These three measures are universal background checks, red flag laws, and a repeal of the Dickie Amendment that bars federal funding for anti-gun research.

None of those are really about safety. Not at all. Universal background checks won’t have any appreciable impact on homicides since evidence suggests that guns used by criminals are purchased via the black market. Red flag laws won’t work for other reasons.

The Dickie Amendment bars federal funding for anti-gun research, which means it bars funding for research that begins biased and works from there. It explicitly says that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” It doesn’t bar gun research or research into gun violence.

But Giffords doesn’t care about any of that. They want to present a group of supposed gun owners–and there’s almost no way all the people who are affiliated with this group are going to be gun owners–so they can try and pressure legislators into accepting gun control measures as the will of gun owners.

It’s not.

As the NRA-ILA notes, this is nothing more than an attempt to try and drive a wedge into the heart of the gun community, to weaponize the Fudds and present them as the rank and file gun owner. They’re not, but it’s imperative that gun rights activists be onhand whenever possible to counter these people, to call them on their lies and distortions, to call them out on their nonsense in general.