This Bushmaster ad ran in Maxim magazine, according to Mother Jones (Bushmaster)
While large ad agencies these days shy away from working for gun manufacturers, it turns out that they have a little secret to boosting sales. Gun manufacturers obviously and openly pander to toxic masculinity, appealing to every lousy, dangerous trope out there, shamelessly amping up male insecurity and fostering the idea that one can be a manly man if you just get yourself unnecessarily armed to the teeth. And of course, women can be a womanly woman right alongside their manly men, guns for all!
To entice potential customers to purchase its high-powered assault rifle, Bushmaster, one of America’s largest gun manufacturers, uses the slogan “Justice for All.’’ Its print ads tell prospective buyers: “Consider your man card reissued.” Sig Sauer, another major gun manufacturer, advertises its MCX rifle in a dramatic video of a single shooter, calling the gun the “start of a new era.”
In the wake of the massacre at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida, many politicians are demanding stricter gun laws. But a lot less attention is focused on the marketing tactics of American gun manufacturers, who can — unlike cigarette and alcohol companies — legally and freely market their products with little to no regulation.
“If you look at the gun industry’s advertising today, it’s militarized,” says Josh Sugarmann, the founder and executive director of the Violence Policy Center, an American nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control. “It’s focused on two things: assault weapons and high-capacity semi-automatic pistols.”
I was a around for the major societal shift and restrictions on tobacco and alcohol advertising. Those were considered to be good and necessary restrictions, but once again, it seems guns are exempt.
Ever since the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, put assault weapons back in the spotlight, the amount of money spent on gun advertising has increased dramatically. From 2012 to 2013, the amount spent by five of the largest assault weapons manufacturers on advertising their own brands leapt more than 33 percent, according to Kantar Media data.
Remington’s ad spending nearly doubled, from $740,000 to more than $1.4 million in those years; Sig Sauer’s soared from just $30,000 to $230,000, according to Kantar.
Source: Kantar Media Get the data.
Regardless of who’s writing the copy or executing the campaigns, these manufacturers are hardly reliant on ad strategy to drive sales; Smith & Wesson pulled in more than $551 million in revenue last year, thanks mostly to a dedicated, enthusiastic population of loyal gun buyers.
“If you focus on manufacturer advertising, you are missing the larger picture,” Terrence Witkowski, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, who has studied the visual language of gun culture. “American gun culture is a form of consumer culture where much influence flows from the grassroots, bottom up, not top down.”
The sad truth is tragedies like the ones in Orlando or Newtown are actually their own best advertising. While most gun manufacturers will never admit it, the demonization that is rained down on their products is good for business, as sales boom in the aftermath.
In 1993, reports that the weapon used in a mass shooting in San Francisco was a Tec-9 set off waves of people condemning the gun. To Intratec, the gun’s manufacturer, those howls of anger were music to its ears.
“I’m kind of flattered,” Mike Solo, Intratec’s marketing and sales director, told the New York Times. “It just has that advertising tingle to it. Hey, it’s talked about, it’s read about, the media write about it. That generates more sales for me. It might sound cold and cruel, but I’m sales oriented.”
“I’m sales oriented”. Yeah, who cares about all those dead people, there are sales to be made.
Via Raw Story.
If I may, John Fogerty once had something really apropos this topic on his 1986 album…
The societal shift on advertising alcohol and cigarettes took a huge effort and the poison-selling capitalists at Philip Morris are still fighting a rearguard battle. It took an across the board push, from showing the inner guts of the tobacco lobby, to lawsuits over the concealment of knowledge of toxicity, to selective taxation, and raising awareness of the cost/benefit analysis of the impact to public health. Hmm…. I wonder if anyone is attempting a strategic coordination of similar moves against gun sales and laws.
One of the critical wedge issues on tobacco was the accumulating evidence that the tobacco producers were aware of and lied about the carcinogenic properties of their products. Their evil choices there left them open for product liability lawsuits that they would have never been exposed to if they had gone a toxic masculinity route with their marketing. (“Our shit will kill you. That’s why smoking it makes you a badass. Buy badass cigarettes. Nietzsche would. Camus did.”) product liability suits against gun manufacturers have not found that wedge angle yet -- you can’t really sue a gun-maker and say “I bought your product not realizing it was dangerous…” It’s a problem where there are lots of dependencies, so there’s no single focal point where a tactical push is plausible* So this fight is going to have to be like the atheism versus religion fight: a consistent across-the-board un-focused pressure. That way there are no focal points or central leadership to be suborned or discredited, and the opposition has to deal with a thousand “front lines” where the tactical action on each one is completely different. That strategy -- the strategy of non-strategy -- is ultimately a resource exhaustion and bandwidth depletion strategy. I.e.: a war of attrition. And it works.
(* Except the obvious one: ban guns)
I remember that. Now, this change would be appropriate:
Or penis. Either would work. It’s rather shameful that such marketing tactics work on so many men. You’d think they wouldn’t want to be considered to be so damn stupid.
Marcus:
The advertising restrictions came in around what, 1970? Yes, the tobacco and alcohol lobbies howled, but the push for restrictions was about cutting down on deaths, particularly those caused by alcohol, and I think you have more of a wedge parallel there. It doesn’t take much alcohol to incite and result in various types of injury and death. It doesn’t take much alcohol to incite and result in various types of violence. Alcohol and just about anything isn’t a good mix, alcohol and cars, alcohol and weapons, etc.
Alcohol is still around and widely used because it’s never going to go away, but the reduction in alcohol related deaths is way down from previous decades and generations. That’s down to the societal shift, where excessive drinking is looked down upon more than previous times, campaigns against drink driving hit hard, and are ongoing, and restrictions and laws were put into place to allow effective prosecution of alcohol related crimes. There’s zero reason that can’t happen with guns, too.
Guns should be taxed out the ass, because there will always be people who would buy them anyway, but when other perceived vices are being taxed to death, why not guns? Why not have mandatory insurance, like with vehicles? Guns are more dangerous than cars, so…
Guns should be taxed out the ass, because there will always be people who would buy them anyway
Respectfully disagree: Then guns become the privilege of the wealthy. That’s already too much the case and we need to consider how gun legislation can be used to differentially disempower (e.g.: changing carry laws in California to disarm the Black Panthers, instead of the cops)
I have been thinking obsessively over the last few days and I’ve come up with a solution that works for me. I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve got a pretty substantial arsenal that I collected back in the day and I still have. It’s …. “philosophically problematic” … for me now. I mean to eventually explore the layers of the problem and my views on it, very publicly. I’m not sure when because I’m still running my arguments by friends and vetting them. If I ever get around to converting my website into a wordpress blog, I’m going to flense and dissect myself on that issue. Oh, joy.
Oh, I forgot the main point: the obvious answer is to ban them, not tax them. That is what we should do.
There are a lot of details. I don’t want to haul your comment thread into that discussion, though, without a “go ahead”
Things not to do while writing comments about guns:
Leave iTunes shuffling on John Fogerty, have “Deja Vu All Over Again” come up and your keyboard is soaked in tears.
Fogerty’s always been so on point it’s scary:
Marcus:
If you wait to do that until your FTB blog is up, you’ll get a fucktonne of views, I can say that much.
Absolutely, I agree. It’s just not going to happen. Oh, and you have full ‘go ahead’ privileges here.
Taxing tobacco makes sense because cigarettes just kill you with cancer, they don’t alter your relationship to the body politic. Mao was right: power comes from the barrel of a gun. One of the reasons 2nd amendment nuts are 2nd amendment nuts is because of the exact same power dynamic/dynastic fear that is fuelling trump-style white racist political rage. The tea party was joined at the hip with 2nd amendment nuts and was, arguably, racist without even needing to think of themselves as such -- simply because if you have a large group of almost exclusively white people with guns, you have a race problem happening, by definition.
So we cannot tax guns out of existence without actually empowering white racists, and making owning a gun a badge of distinction -not shame-. Taxing guns out of existence is putting out fire with gasoline.
Thanks for the “go ahead” -- just tell me to put a lid on it and you know I’ll respect it. Also, I don’t know if I’ll have an FTb or not, yet. If I do, I’ll definitely attack that topic.
So here’s a bit of what I think regarding gun bans, ultra-condensed. Just add water and it’s a short series of blog postings:
-- Gun ban is obvious and necessary
-- The existing huge inventory of guns in the US is a big problem but not as big as it seems
-- Humans seem to have a viscerals “MIIIIIIIIINE!!! PRECIOUSSSSS!!!!” gollum-like reaction to having something they own, that they like, taken away from them
-- Mao was right: power comes from the barrel of a gun
-- Humans seem to have an ability to concern themselves with the fate of their future-selves; they appear to not be as good at thinking about the fate of their future-descendants that have not yet happened
That’s the set-up. Then I was thinking about Wayne LaPierre and the NRA’s “from my cold dead hands” bullshit and it hit me. It’d be much easier to get everyone to ban guns for the next generation. Indeed, we’ve seen that humans seem to be prepared to leave future generations a planet that has been thoroughly fucked over. Why not fuck the future generations of americans just a tiny bit harder and ban guns for anyone born as of a certain date. You get to keep your guns until, when you die, the state police gently and respectfully retrieve your guns from your cold hands that hopefully died a natural death at a comfortable old age. What you don’t get to do is give your guns to your kids. Your kids get a staged tax write-off for the book value of your guns, taken out of your estate taxes. The guns are then chopped up with an oxyacetylene torch and turned in for recycling. As one of my friends said when I ran this by him “the ghost of Wayne LaPierre would come wailing out of his crypt in broad daylight.” Yessssssss…..
That neatly solves the critical problems about a gun ban that I identified above:
-- It does not selectively disempower one politic or race or economic status; everyone dies eventually
-- There is no moment when the state police show up door to door collecting guns and getting shot at by gun nuts
-- There is no single massive moment when there’s a huge tax burden associated with a gun buy-back, the cost is amortized gently over 100 years or so and best of all it appears as a windfall to the deceden’t heirs: you didn’t get daddy’s $5000 gun collection, but you got $5000 worth of tax write off you can buy something nice with. You can buy some education with $5000 or an absolutely absurd collection of airsofts for $5000, or a beautifully crafted grozer mongol recurve bow.*
The most important thing my proposal does is it gets guns out of the hands of younger people. Yes, they are being disproportionately targeted for political disempowerment. But a) everyone always fucks the young, politically b) they maybe deserve it -- what is the average age of mass shooters? 34 c) they’re not born yet, so they can’t really complain. It neatly addresses the millions of gun owners like myself who consider themselves responsible and careful, who think they’d never shoot a fly unless there’s a zombie outbreak.**
There remains the minor detail of the 2nd amendment. Let me dispatch that as well: allow weapons ownership regulations to maintain 1776-level technology. As it is right now. I can walk into walmart and buy a flintlock with no regulation at all. I can buy a mongol recurve bow and -- if I was good enough -- I could hunt with it except I despise hunting. I can buy a court sword on amazon.com and take fencing lessons. Let’s freeze it there. If someone wants modern weaponry, they can join the national guard. It was my stint in the army reserve that gave me my views about what a well-regulated milita is.
Last observation: the critical problem with gun ownership is distinguishing “good guys” from “bad guys”. I hate to say this, kids, but age is a real easy, ultra reliable, unforgeable criterion. My proposal means that if anyone sees someone young-looking with a gun, they are probably a threat. Discriminating threat is a big deal, and my proposal is the only solution I can think of that works 100% of the time and does not require a complex technical framework of controls. Basically, my proposal is to say “Sorry kids, if you’re born after Jan 1, 2017, you’re not allowed to ever own a modern gun in this country. But here’s a beautiful mongol recurve bow! Or you can learn to fence with an epee. Have at it.”
From that, you can see where I’m going to go personally with my gun collection.** :) Except I hope the guy who uses the oxyacetylene torch on my arsenal makes something cool out of it.
“Cold Dead Hands” indeed.
(* Talk about a work of art! So much cheaper than a gun and such a high level of skill to use. I cry with frustration at how hard it is, compared to a handgun… You can do the math from there)
(** I have my doubts about the whole “zombie” thing. This is relevant. It seems to me that the zombie thing is an excuse to other a whole lot of people, who happen to be conveniently dead, and go on a mass genocidal rampage trying to kill them. I see the whole zombie thing as a thin fig-leave over a deep-seated cultural and possibly evolved-in tribal behavior that makes us want to have a generalized “other” that we can have pogroms against. Yes, I am deeply misanthropic.)
(*** I collected it because they are beautiful pieces of functional engineering. For the same reason I love my hand-forged daisho I had made for me in 1997. Weapons can be art. This is difficult for me. I do not like the idea of seeing a certain one of my rifles get torched apart -- but then I realized I won’t be there to see it if I’m dead! PS -- the grozer is not going in the pile; it’s a bow.)
PS -- How do you have a mass shooting with a flintlock? Easy. You take a line of guys with flintlocks…
If flintlocks become a problem, then we sunset them too.
Marcus:
I do. :D
Marcus:
I know how to fence, and I love it, it’s a serious challenge on many levels to do it well. I’m also a fan of sharp, pointy things, and have a rather large number of them. My last addition was a gorgeous Venetian style stiletto. (An actual one, not a bloody switchblade.) Much to my amusement, over in one of the threads at Pharyngula, two men recounted stories of being woken at night by someone rummaging about in their house, leaping out of bed, grabbing a sword, and giving chase. The thieves could have outdistanced a roadrunner, so confrontation avoided. Swords are scary.
@Marcus, interesting ideas! I like the idea that the inheritance is put at an end. My gun came from my great-grandfather. I live on a farm and occasionally need to humanely dispatch a suffering animal, but I do wonder what will happen to it when I am gone?
One of those really cool sculptures using the rifle barrel cut in half the long way as feathers on a bird? That would be SO awesome…
And looking forward to a new blog! :-D
@kestrel -- Yeah, my grandpa’s 1880 winchester saddle rifle would get chopped up. He’d haunt me from the grave. Except in my scenario, I’d already be dead. :)
Marcus:
I’m very conflicted about such items, because there’s history there, and a family connection. I’m okay with displaying such items, or donating them to a museum.
@Marcus: that would be haunt-worthy, maybe you would be haunted *beyond* the grave? Or haunted in heaven? Or hell? I have no idea how that would work, because if you’re dead too you could haunt him right back. And that would be a really awesome relic to have hanging on the wall!
My maternal grandfather had a flintlock musket that was handed down from previous generations. He didn’t dare to fire it, and it just hung it over his fireplace. I saw tombstones in the family cemetery in Tennessee dating to the 1700s when he was buried, so I believe it was in the family that long.
Nerd @ 19:
What happened to it, still have it?
Gun advertising is increasingly aimed at women. There’s still plenty of it where women are little more than eye candy, but an increasing number of products are specifically aimed at women, and women appear more often in general advertising. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that advertising and gun press articles pretty much entirely feature white people. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an African American in a gun ad, or in a magazine article. I think the same thing applies for Asian American men as well, although Asians turn up in articles about historical Asian firearms. About the only person I can think of who comes close to being a person of colour you’re likely to see in the gun press is Arab American cop and gun writer Masaad Ayoob. Some rather interesting implications there, that black people don’t own legal guns, and presumably that if you see one with a firearm that they’re “a bad guy with a gun,” and that other sorts of non white people aren’t man enough to use firearms, or something along those lines.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an African American in a gun ad
AT-15 ads aimed at Black Panthers
… somehow not what the typical 2nd amendment nut was picturing.