We’ve directly experienced some astroturfing by the anti-gunners, but this one probably sets a new standard for shamelessness.

Last week, sandwiched between a row of shops and apartments, you may have noticed that a store hawking firearms miraculously opened for two days on Manhattan’s Lower East Side

Had you ventured inside and asked the gruff-sounding owner whether you could take a closer look at, say, a revolver, you probably would have encountered the following sales pitch:

“…this revolver, it’s the easiest gun we have to use. It’s our most popular one. It’s a 22-caliber, six-inch revolver,” the clerk begins. “It’s also a gun that a five-year-old found in his parents’ bedroom, went down and shot his nine-month-old baby brother with it.”

If that sounds a lot like the least effective sales pitch of all time, there’s a reason for that.

An overwhelmingly depressing and frank sales pitch — the kind you won’t hear at any other gun store in the country — was exactly what States United Against Gun Violence was, well, shooting for when it did the unimaginable last week and opened a pretend gun shop in a city known for having some of the strictest gun-control laws in the nation.

“Our goal was to grab people’s attention,” New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Executive Director Leah Gunn Barrett told The Washington Post. “Gun owners often believe that firearms make them safer, but having a gun in your home actually makes you far less safe for homicide, suicide and domestic violence.”

You’re a liar, but that’s beside the point.  Your real goal, Ms. Barrett, was to be the shameless, insulting, intrusive, know-it-all, collectivist, loathsome pricks and assholes you are.

You succeeded.  No, not in turning back the support of legitimate customers seeking self defense and protection for their families, a God-given right and duty, for they will ultimately be in our camp supporting the right of self defense whether they obtain a weapon for their own use or not.  In fact, they already are.  You didn’t win their hearts and minds.  We do that better than you.  Every day we carry around you and refuse to “go crazy” and shoot people like you want us to, every day we own guns and act like the peaceable folk we really are, every day we function in overwatch for those of you who don’t carry and wouldn’t be able to defend your families, is another day we win people to our side.  And everyone knows it.

No, your culpability has to do with what happens to these poor people if they need self defense and they were turned away from obtaining such by your antics.  Then your accountability before God will weigh heavily on your souls, now and in eternity.  Sleep well while you contemplate your responsibility and fate before God.

I see that David Codrea also quickly picked up on this report.

Since the premise of the video is built around a lie, why should we believe any of it? After seeing previous propaganda efforts built around Bloomberg’s “Average Joe gun owner” and MoveOn.org’s “proud defender of the Second Amendment,” and noting their identities and affiliations were (and continue to be) intentionally withheld, why should we not question just who the “convinced customers” really are, and if they weren’t in on the scam from the start, and each acting a part?

Seriously, why believe the known deceivers behind the video? And did it never strike them (with their unwarranted sense of superiority and sophistication, it probably didn’t) that reactions from New York City residents might not exactly be representative of any place else?

The biggest thing that stands out though, is how the advocacy group was able to get all of those guns legally into New York City, with its draconian registration requirements.

Read all of David’s piece.  I wondered about that too, and I’ve sent this URL to the contact e-mail addresses associated with both of these anti-gun web sites.  What do you bet I’ll never hear back?  I’ll publish any response I get.