When you think of gun rights groups buying advertising, you don’t think of the Second Amendment Foundation.

Don’t get me wrong, they do great work. They’re often the ones filing lawsuits and taking various governments to task on infringing on our rights, but they’re not known for buying advertising, really.

Yet, it seems that’s precisely what they’re doing.

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) announced this week that it is launching a new TV ad campaign effort to “warn America of a coming attack on Second Amendment rights.”

According to a SAF press release, founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said the group’s message will broadcast on over 20 cable television networks more than 200 times during the first week of January.

“The well-financed gun prohibition movement is poised to strike in an effort to make up for lost time due to Joe Biden’s failure to get the gun prohibition agenda through during his first year in office,” Gottlieb said in a statement. “We’re expecting an unprecedented assault on Second Amendment rights heading into the new year. Anti-gunners will grasp at straws to grab every headline they can, and make no mistake, they are determined to help Biden go after your rights in 2022.

“That’s why we’re kicking off the New Year with a record number of pro-gun rights TV spots in a single week,” he added. “The threat to our Second Amendment rights cannot be over-stated. The billionaire-backed gun ban lobby is fearful of a gun rights ruling from the Supreme Court this summer, and a power flip at the mid-term elections, so they will be pushing Biden and their allies on Capitol Hill and in several states to get things done now, before they lose the political muscle to push their agenda.”

Normally, when we talk about major ad buys, we’re talking about the NRA doing the buying. After all, they’re the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla in the gun rights discussion.

However, the NRA is a little busy at the moment, what with their normal stuff plus fighting with the state of New York just to stay alive. Yet this helps me illustrate a point I’ve tried to make to gun control advocates for years now.

They claim that if the NRA no longer existed, gun control would be easy peasy.

That’s simply not true. The NRA’s power lies in its membership. If the group disappeared tomorrow, those members wouldn’t suddenly stop supporting gun rights. Instead, they’d simply shift to one of the other gun rights groups and those groups would step in to fill that void.

Case in point: The Second Amendment Foundation.

The biggest difference would be that now all those NRA members are going to these groups good and riled up.

The Second Amendment Foundation is making ad buys at a time when the NRA normally would, but isn’t. They’re filling that void because the void needs to be filled.

Do you really think other groups won’t step in to fill other voids? Hardly.

I’m personally glad to see the SAF stepping up here. They do a lot of great work and now they’re simply finding a way to do even more of it.