I recently received an email from a gentleman named Jon, regarding my use of terms such as “assault weapons” and “gun control” on this site. Jon stated that he believed I should use terms such as “politically incorrect guns” instead of “assault weapons,” and to similarly frame the “gun control” issue in a more pro-guns manner. I wholeheartedly agree with Jon’s statement when it comes to discussing gun rights in person or on TV, but the internet is a different story:
I say that things are different on the internet due to the constraints imposed by search engines. The overwhelming majority of the traffic to my learnaboutguns.com site comes from Google as a result of people searching for terms such as “gun control” and “assault weapon.”
Were I to remove those terms from my site and replace them with terms like “gun rights” and “politically incorrect guns,” then I would lose that search traffic. That is because few if any of the people I am trying to persuade to support gun rights are searching for these pro-gun-rights search terms. Instead, they are searching Google by using the anti-gun-rights search terms that Jon very correctly states are bad.
Were I to lose that traffic, I would lose the opportunity to persuade these anti-gun peple about the benefits of gun rights and gun ownership. Instead of seeing my pro gun rights website, these searchers would end up at an anti rights website, where they would be further indoctrinated against guns.
So by all means, I would encourage the readers of this site to frame the gun control issue in a pro guns manner when discussing guns in person. Use terms such as “gun rights” instead of “gun control.” Discuss “politically incorrect guns,” instead referring to them as “assault weapons.” But when writting online articles that visitors will find through search engines, keep in mind that your article must have the right search engine keywords if it is to be found by people using Google, Yahoo, etc.