"Gun Nuts" -- Projection, deliberate and otherwise, amongst the hoplophobes. "The whole purpose being to defame the targeted group and further isolate them from the general population."

Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.

Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

An example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or "projecting," those same faults onto another person or object. -- Wikipedia.

A thief will always suspect you of stealing from him and liar will doubt your honesty. But what are we to make of people who reject well-reasoned arguments by falling back on allegations of mental illness and latent criminality? A case in point is Joe Biden, for the New York Times warns us that Biden Is Back for a 2nd Run at Gun Limits.

Never much known for restraint, Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not hold back during a presidential primary debate in 2007 when a voter asking about gun rights in a recorded video displayed a fearsome-looking semiautomatic rifle and declared, “This is my baby.”

Mr. Biden, then a Delaware senator in a dark-horse bid for the White House, shook his head. “I tell you what, if that’s his baby, he needs help,” he said. “I think he just made an admission against self-interest. I don’t know if he’s mentally qualified to own that gun.”

The candidate’s blunt, dismissive remark cheered one side of America’s long-polarized debate about guns and alienated the other.

How many times have you personally been called a "gun nut" or had your sanity doubted by some hoplophobe? Personally, I've lost count. Once, when a guy called me crazy, I tired of the game and said, "Well, I'm still armed to the teeth so that just complicates your problem, doesn't it?"

What you must understand is that, for collectivists, projection is a part of psychological operations designed to shape the battlefield in their favor. From an essay entitled "What Soviet PSYOP Mirror Imaging Can Tell Us by James Melnich (found in Psychological Operations, edited by Air Force Colonels Frank Goldstein and Benjamin Findley, 1996):

Soviet propaganda was rife with allusions to the ultimate enemy, whether the enemy be world imperialism, Nazi storm troopers, supporters of SDI, Zionism, or religious activists in the Soviet Union. The ultimate enemy was usually portrayed as being antihuman and opposed to everything the Soviet Union stood for. For example, Zionism was defined as a "deadly enemy of the Soviet Union from its very beginning." There was usually a plurality of Soviet ultimate enemies, depending on the international situation. An ultimate enemy in Soviet propaganda was first dehumanized, then made part of an anti-Soviet worldwide conspiratorial network (i.e., Afghan freedom fighters became bandits fighting as agents of US imperialism; unofficial religious figures in the Soviet Union were linked with dark forces from abroad).

In attempting to describe the ultimate enemy, whoever and whatever that might have been at a given time, Soviet propagandists sometimes drew from actual Soviet acts of barbarism. Thus their disinformation, as a form of mirror imaging, reflected back into the pool of Soviet reality. For one example, I will draw from personal experience.

In the early 1980s, I met a Soviet emigre woman who was convinced that evangelical Christians in the Ukraine sacrificed babies by rolling them in barrels with spikes as part of some religious ritual. She, of course, had never witnessed such a thing, but said that she heard about these people when she lived in the Soviet Union. Obviously, she was the victim of very gross Soviet disinformation -- and there were other Soviet campaigns in which other religious groups were under attack by the state. One can find numerous articles accusing Soviet Baptists of drowning children or performing other dark and perfidious acts -- the whole purpose being to defame the targeted group and further isolate them from the general population.

Nevertheless, the matter of the spikes continued to bother me: why such a particular disinformation image? Where did it come from? Did a propagandist simply make it up out of thin air, or did it spring from some other source? I have no final answer to this question, but a year or so later, when I was reading Michael Voslensky's work, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, a particular passage leapt out at me. Voslensky, in quoting a 1920s account about the Cheka (the earliest forerunner of the KGB), recounted various Cheka methods of torture and execution of their victims. One such method was reported this way: "at Voronezh they put their victims naked in barrels spiked on the inside and rolled them." This account and recent Soviet disinformation against religious groups are separated by more than one-half century. Are they somehow related, or did later Soviet propagandists simply make up the recent vicious accusation out of thin air? One cannot be certain, of course, but I would posit this as a possible example of a mirror image projecdted out of the past. (Pages 192-194)

The thing to remember is that this is what all collectivists do. Here's a thought: what if the new "assault Weapons Ban" floated by Diane Feinstein is simply a disposable red herring in order to facilitate an attack on private sales through the back door of "mental health"? The thing is, if you believe Biden and Company, all us firearm owners are crazy.

Just keep in your memory Melnich's phrase: "The whole purpose being to defame the targeted group and further isolate them from the general population." It explains a lot of what you're hearing these days, is a classic collectivist tactic and explains a lot of the "projection" going on.