Gun advocates reframe reform talk as exploitative opportunism to silence it

Evidence

Another strategy, designed to stifle any talk of gun reforms, condemns any talk about the role of guns in the massacre as political opportunism that exploits people’s grief in a time of mourning. Wayne LaPierre set the tone: “While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully silent” (Goldstein, 2012). In an even more outlandish charge of opportunism against President Clinton after the Columbine shooting, LaPierre contended that Clinton was “willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his political agenda and his vice president, too” (Pear, 2000). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1243

Categorization

• DEFINE: This shows a concrete moral-disengagement mechanism (advantageous comparison/euphemistic labeling) applied politically — reframing opponents’ legitimate concern as self-interested exploitation.
• XREF: The practice of dismissing critics’ motives rather than their arguments resembles the authoritarian-authority dynamic in the reader’s vault claims about how social-conservative policy gets normalized (Cooper’s argument).
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1243