Hide Your Guns

In 2009, Alex Jones was taking in advertising money from a business called Hide Your Guns:

At face value, this is a pretty funny commercial, particularly the part about them having some advice about where to absolutely never hide your guns.

People who hide caches of weapons are not your normal, run of the mill gun enthusiasts worried about people coming to steal their guns. They are people who expect to be actively involved in a war. That is who this commercial is targeted at.

All you need to hear is that part about how their book and website may “disappear” at any moment, so you need to act now. That is not only desperate and transparent sales-talk, but it also indicates that maybe the people behind Hide Your Guns are worried that some of their actions fall on the wrong side of the law, or they may get sued because of the actions of one of their customers.

Regardless, Hide Your Guns’ website is still up and running, and right on their homepage is a video plea to get their book, complete with a fairly racist and absolutely anachronistic recreation of a black man buying an illegal gun:

The rest of the website is just a bizarre attempt to scare people about the government coming to take their guns, while hiding behind the argument that they are just trying to help people hide their guns from “criminals and looters.”

Whatever the case, it appears that the book has not been very successful, as can be assumed from reading this passage:

“We decided to limit the printing to only a few thousand. There are two reasons for this. One, these techniques will not work if we sell too many copies and spill the beans en mass. Two, I really don’t want to be targeted as a terrorist for simply helping folks keep their guns and out of the hands of criminals and looters. Seriously, that means this offer (and the web page) may disappear at any time and without warning. (I guess it also means that I could disappear at any time without warning if the wrong people don’t like the information I’m providing.) Our plan is to turn the website off once our initial copies are sold just to play it safe.”

The above clip of the commercial they were airing on the Alex Jones Show came from an episode from January 2011. Given that we know that they have said that they are going to turn off the website once they sell the “few thousand” books they printed (and would not print more), and that the website is definitely still up and running, it only stands to reason that they have not moved those books in the past seven years.

More likely, they are lying about the limited run of books and their plans to disappear in order to create an image of artificial scarcity, hoping to make customers feel like they have to act now, before it’s too late.

And it’s pretty clear these folks are full of shit, based on a post-script they’ve added at the bottom of their homepage:

“P.P.S. I do have one additional request. Please do NOT post this on Facebook or any social media. I don’t want this to go viral and frankly don’t want ANY additional publicity.”

I find it hard to believe that the person writing this would be pleading with people to not post about their book on social media because they don’t want publicity, while at the same time literally paying Alex Jones to provide them with publicity on a national radio show.