(CNN)When Supreme Court justices meet behind closed doors Friday, a conference that comes three days after the country's latest mass shooting, they are scheduled to discuss whether to add a blockbuster issue to the docket for next term: the scope of the Second Amendment.
The court has largely dodged the issue since issuing two landmark opinions in 2008 and 2010, when it held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms at home for self- defense.
Gun rights advocates and even some of the justices themselves have expressed frustration that the court has declined to further define the scope of the right as lower courts across the country have upheld restrictions.
As Congress is moving legislation limiting the right to keep and bear arms, we’ve seen a flood of anti-gun propaganda in recent weeks. Those behind it want to get people to accept that there’s not only a need for gun control, but a dire one.
Before I get into who’s likely behind this and how they’re operating, I need to give readers a quick overview of what propaganda is and why it works. Only then can we see the current effort for what it is and learn to be effective in countering it.
These are all very human errors of judgment. Dictators are people, too, and sometimes they'll act on imperfect information or erroneous gut feeling. But Treisman makes the point that they may be prone to such errors precisely because they are dictators. They'll be fooled by polls which people don't answer sincerely, taken in by their own propaganda (like Malawi ruler Hastings Banda, who called and lost a referendum in 1993 because he'd been impressed by the high turnout at rallies in his support even though people had been forced to attend them). And sometimes they'll rule for so long that their mental faculties will be less sharp than at the outset.