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If you’re in the market for a .22 shotgun for your kindergartner, Crickett has you covered. Trademarked by Keystone Sporting Arms as “My First Rifle”, the company markets the weapon for “true winners” in a sickly-sweet pink among a range of color swatches. A testimonial praises the weapon as “just the right size” for a five-year-old, without mentioning that, in 2013, a Kentucky boy of the very same age used the weapon to accidentally shoot and kill his two-year-old sister. …

[The Violence Policy Center’s Josh] Sugarmann says that the industry is nakedly capitalizing on the vibe that “the world’s going to hell, you gotta buy a gun.” In particular, it’s targeting Asian Americans — who traditionally have low gun ownership and support stricter gun control — but who faced an upswell of hate crimes as a result of Covid panic. To the industry, not only are Asian-Americans the fastest growing voter group in the United States with increasing size and consumer power, they are “viewed as an untapped market by gunmakers.” 

The NSSF reports that, between 2019 and 2002, there was a 43 percent increase in Asian-American gun ownership, a 49 percent rise by Latinos, and a 58 percent increase among Black people. Women are also the targets of renewed campaigns, with a recent study finding that Twitter and YouTube influencers are prime avenues for sales. The study’s authors found that “videos with women included protection themes” were viewed two-and-a-half times more often than videos without women, though they couldn’t account for whether this appealed to women themselves or men seeking to protect them. Either way, they noted that “YouTube and Twitter subsidize gun advertising by offering server and streaming services at no cost to gun manufacturers,” and that the social media companies are cashing in.

Now anyone can take up arms against a changing world. Remember those two-thirds of gun owners who claimed they needed them for self-defense in 2005? Their number rose to 88 percent in 2021. A diverse coalition is coming together around the most American of ideas: consumption is king. The best way to manage hate, fear, crisis and uncertainty is to go out and buy the thing that you’re terrified of.

— Elle Hardy in Clever Marketing Is the Gun Industry’s Most Lethal Weapon

 

 

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

104 COMMENTS

        • When I was a kid you could get anything you could pay for delivered to your front door. (which is how it should still be)

        • Of hop on your bike and roll on down to your friendly neighbourhood Western Auto and buy it cash afteryou’ve made sure it fits you, then take it home along with about five boxes of 22 WRF ammunition for an additional buckannaquarter.
          And no one would notice that more than they would if you were fishing a bottle of Coke out of the soda machine for ten cents. Imagine that. ten cents for a 12 ounce pop, and two bits for a box of fifty .22LR Winchester. And if you had your Dad drive you down you were burning 19 cents the gallon high-test gasoline.
          That was back when we had an economy.

        • Well, as an adult you can now buy a smooth bore lever gun from Henry. They call it the “garden gun”. Which I understand was used to dispatch pests in your garden. Back in your grandmothers time.

        • chris. In my grandmothers time they used bows and slings to eliminate pests. In my time we used the smoothbores for the same job.

          Had to be careful on the farm. Livestock and buildings and machinery shared the same spaces as the pests.

    • Do. Not. Underestimate. Ratshot.

      Little known fact, the USA was weeks away from losing WWII and as a last ditch effort to survive sent two pilots with a .22 handguns loaded with ratshot to be fired at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You know the result.

      • Guess I fell asleep or was daydreaming during that part of my history class. But…since I read it on the interwebs, I will add that to my rotation of truth to be told to all that will listen.

      • I looked at a Henry but bought a Savage bolt action .22 smoothbore for a whole lot less. It throws a decent pattern at 10 yards with Federal and Winchester crimped shotshells. I haven’t tried the CCI shot capsules yet.

    • I always wanted a .22 shotgun. My dad wouldn’t let me have one. Gave me a 12 gauge instead.

      OK, to be a tiny bit serious, many of us have fired “ratshot” through our .22s. Of course, that doesn’t make the .22 a shotgun, but it’s something of an approximation, if all you want to do is kill rats and mice at close range.

      I don’t even know if they still make ratshot any more. Haven’t seen any in years.

        • If I remember right, old time folklore says 22LR birdshot will break the feathers and skin of a pigeon and not penetrate further. The tiny pellets are so small people could swallow by mistake. These were used to kill rats indoors with near zero ricochet off cinderblock. Can use to drive away coyote etc without killing for those soft hearted.

      • Paul

        Two of the local gun shops near me show CCI ratshot on their websites. Not sure if anyone else still makes it.

  2. …and in other news:

    Clever Lies are the Gun Control Industry’s Most Lethal Weapon.

    (their motto is: “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance…baffle them with bullshit”. This motto is attributed to a former Monsanto marketing shill who is currently a paid wh0re for Bloomberg and Co.)

    • One very wise thing some people can do about josh sugarmann et al is cease putting money in Gun Control coffers by way of membership in the aarp and the like. When it comes to Protecting the 2A continuing to be a member of the aarp or the like confirms you are a back stabbing self serving shthead.

      • Exactly.
        This was a topic of discussion at a neighborhood pool party/BBQ gathering at my home over the summer.
        Most were blissfully unaware of how woke/progtarded AARP has become.

        • AARP lost me back when they were campaigning so hard for Obama’s unAffordable Care Act. They are nothing more than an unregistered PAC group for Democrat policies.

        • I responded, innocently, to ONE piece sent me by AARP about cheaper car insurance. Took me five years or more to finally get them to stop pestering me. Still get their firestarters in the postal weekly diarrhoea

        • Almost joined arrp- until I wised up to their gun-grabbing agenda. Some folks just hafta ruin things for everyone else!
          Ive been a gun collector/lover since childhood- for a WHOLE LOT longer than I’ve been an old goat…

      • Anytime the AARP sends me something with a pre posted envelope I send it back – empty. Sure, it’s only a few cents charged against their postage permit but it amuses me to waste more of their money.

    • “If anyone is selling fear, it’s the Democrats.”

      Bingo.

      Drilling down into the article, I found this :

      “For a country that barely makes its own stuff anymore, one thing it continues to manufacture is a steady stream of gun owners. So while we associate the all-American gun owner with angry young men, they are beginning to look much more representative of the country. From those first buds of selling self-protection to a diverse market in the 1990s, the industry is using crisis to continue a hard pivot toward the people who are too often the victims of gun violence.”

      They’re losing the messaging war, and they know it. Their policies can’t win elections, so they gin up fear about us to win elections… 🙂

  4. I read the source material (author Elle Hardy) for this article and try to imagine the “tempest” in the heads of True Believer Progressives such as Ms. Hardy.

    I am unable to confidently picture that “tempest” in their heads which is several swirling, disparate, incoherent, and often contradictory thoughts and emotions.

    I suppose that is the result when your brain development is frozen at the level of a toddler.

    Either that or True Believer Progressives are a level of evil and evil-mastermind–which they apply to the masses in pursuit of greed, power, death, and destruction–that is dangerous and frightening beyond description.

    • Hugely Important Note:

      Ever notice how the overwhelming majority of the real power brokers–billionaires, almost-billionaires, heads of state, CEOs of huge corporations to name a few–are Progressives?

      I believe the explanation is exceedingly simple. Such people can have pretty much anything they want in terms of material items, even their own spaceships at the highest levels. When you can have any material thing that exists, you soon grow bored of material things and start looking elsewhere for amusement. In many (most?) cases, that pursuit of amusement leads to evil-mastermind endeavors: just how far can the evil-mastermind go to use, deceive, coerce, abuse, exploit, and consume others?

      There is a short sequence in the fictional movie Conan the Barbarian which illustrates the concept. The cult leader Thulsa Doom (actor James Earl Jones) shows Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) ultimate power and amusement. There are dozens/hundreds of Thulsa Doom’s cult zealots standing around on a mountainside hanging on his every word. Thulsa Doom points to one of the cult zealots standing on a ledge something like 100 feet above him and says, in a loving and soothing voice, “Come to me my child,” at which point the cult zealot immediately steps off the ledge to her death.

      That is the sort of thing that many (most?) of our world’s real power brokers pursue for amusement.

      Here is a short video clip of that sequence in Conan the Barbarian–the cult zealot steps off the ledge at the 45 second mark.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2EQ0FlVks4

      • Forgot about that one but it is an old concept. More recent examples that come to mind are Most Dangerous Game and the marquis de sade for the more extreme ideas. Bored wealth without a positive direction can be a scary thing when no limits to behavior (moral legal or lethal force) are a factor.

      • “……Ever notice how the overwhelming majority of the real power brokers–billionaires, almost-billionaires, heads of state, CEOs of huge corporations to name a few–are Progressives?…..”

        Worth noting here…….
        If/when the order comes for them to ‘fall on their swords”, most certainly will.
        Most worship money and power above EVERYTHING else, and having seen the systems and people who operate ‘behind the curtain’, understand that resistance is nearly futile.
        These are the people who completely understand the meaning of Jobrak OBiden’s “you didn’t make that” comment.

      • Well everyone knows this scene 100% explains why actor James Earl Jones was both the voice of Darth Vader and CNN, coincidence? I don’t think so.

    • “I read the source material…”

      Same hear. Sensed a lot of airhead in that one. No place to leave comments, of course. She does have a twitter account though, for those who are inclined…

    • “several swirling, disparate, incoherent, and often contradictory thoughts and emotions”

      dude. it’s propaganda. it’s not serious, it’s just word salad. it’s not meant to persuade the mind, it’s meant to influence emotions. don’t try to find meaning in it, there isn’t any. just recognize it as propaganda.

  5. Fear doesn’t have to be a selling point, the reality of what is happening, not just in our Country, but across the world tells a reasonable and intelligent person that any means to provide protection for your family is prudent.

    That is not fear she describes, it is risk assessment. It is fear for those who see the narrative they push being flushed .

  6. Gun owners are buying into fear!!!
    Banning guns is somehow not based on fear!!!!

    Fear and sex sell literally everything. Including food, water and shelter.

    As long as the fear or sex is selling the thing you want it’s righteous. If it’s selling what you don’t want then it’s propaganda. These people need to climb down from their pedestals, high horses, ivory towers or whatever bullshit they’re so hung up on because it’s all the same nonsense designed to flow power away from the individual and toward the state. Spoiler alert: the state doesn’t care one bit about you regardless of how hard you simp for it.

  7. Gee, I just don’t understand how men can be so misogynistic. Just because I have no idea what I am talking about, shouldn’t stop me from telling you how evil you are. Bitch do you know how to do anything? Have you ever had a thought of your own? The best part of you ran down your momma’s leg and left a brown stain on the mattress .

  8. “A testimonial praises the weapon as “just the right size” for a five-year-old, without mentioning that, in 2013, a Kentucky boy of the very same age used the weapon to accidentally shoot and kill his two-year-old sister.”

    A testimonial praises the car as “just what a family needs”, without mentioning that, in 2021, a man used the very same car to intentionally run down and kill people at a parade.

    A testimonial praises the prescription drug as ‘just what a child needs for ADHD’ without mentioning that for decades the drug has been found to be the root cause of the mental health issues that lead to suicide by some kids.

    A testimonial praises the Main Steam Media for their sensationalized coverage of a shooting by a person with mental health issues and its been found that such MSM sensationalized coverage inspires others to commit the same horrible acts.

    • True Believer Progressive response to .40 cal Booger’s comment:

      (hands over both ears and yells) “Stop confusing me with the facts!”

    • A testimonial praises an automobile without mentioning that over 2,000,000 people are (collectively) seriously injured or killed in car accidents annually and that over 90,000 of them are children under age 12.

      the list goes on and on …

      The fact: Of all literally thousands of ‘things application/presence/use’ that can result in intentional or accidental injury or death or suicide – of all those ‘things’ intentional or accidental injury or death or suicide numbers resulting added together firearms are ‘present/ applied/used’ in less than than 0.0002% of those and all the others are greater than 65% more likely to result in injury or death than a firearm use or presence.

      • The murdered ‘Dancing Grannies’ have been avenged.

        What a POS… 🙁

      • What an injustice !! I read this morning that it was his SUV that ran down and killed six innocents. Blame the car, not the person. Another example of an inanimate object getting an individual in trouble. /s

  9. Gun-grabbers keep promoting the claim that “firearms ARE the leading cause of death for children and teens aged between one and 19”, when that’s a single data point from 2020 when much of the country was on Covid lockdown and not driving as much as usual.

    • Why do I get the feeling that they didn’t differentiate suicide from accident from criminal homocide.

    • “firearms ARE the leading cause of death for children and teens aged between one and 19”

      they are.

      it’s just that “children” includes ghetto gang-banger wannabes up to age 18 blasting away at each other over “respect” and drug sales. but they’ll never tell you THAT.

      • Are they now? They were in 2020, when driving was down and suicides and homicides were up. Whether they remained so once the pandemic lockdowns ended remains to be shown. 2021 data should be interesting.

  10. Hmm, The DemoRats let cities burn, either bail out or release the guilty parties, stop enforcing basic laws, fund the ANTIFA & BLM operations and then they demand that the government either abolish the police or defund them.

    I see their point now, How Dare these Minority Groups think for themselves and act with logic and reason, taking steps to defend themselves, their family and community. The whole point of the planned riots was to bring down the Evil Power Structure and replace it with a DemoRat Power struggles at all levels of society.

    Being responsible and self-sufficient is not part of the plan, Vote for the DemoRats and the DemoRats will do your thinking.

    • The world IS going to he!! Everyone noticed during the china flu scamdemic & the lockdowns. And the “mostly peaceful” BlackLootersMurder n anitfool riots.Sell your cloak & buy a aword:Jesus Christ.

        • I’m cool with JESUS. YOU support BLM? And support the race riot’s princess??? You’re soooo FOS…

        • Deb BLM was a largely white organization that lead riots that often included large amounts of black looters/criminals of opportunity. Nothing at all racist in noticing facts so may want to dial the criticisms back to where they are better served.

  11. “In particular, it’s targeting Asian Americans” How exactly is the”gun biz” doing that? Ads in “We Be Orientals”, popups on Alibaba & Amazon, posters in mail salons?

    • Imagine going into a salon and seeing a poster advert for the Barrett M82-A1 with ‘Me Snipe You Loooong Range’ verbage.
      🤔

  12. Asians and women owning guns? Good gracious!

    I love showing anti gun people clips of “rooftop Koreans” defending their lives and property. It really confuses them. They want to call them racists but get confused.

  15. Oh the horror! Marketing a firearm to train our youth. I guess the past 250 years of how parents teach firearm safety to their offspring has simply been forgotten by these folk.

  16. Given that these people display a complete lack of knowledge about firearms fundamentals, why do they expect people to take their thoughts seriously? Would you listen to someone’s ideas about transportation infrastructure if they had opened their article by claiming that trains are operating on the nation’s highways?

    • They might run out to a gun range some place to fire a gun for the first and last time in their life – then claim they are qualified to tell the world how much of an expert they are and that you should not have a gun for self defense. Or there is always the old stand by “My owned a gun…” so that makes them qualified and expert to tell you that you should not have a gun for self defense.

  17. They had a name for people like the Mauser Brothers even back in “the day”, they were called out for what they actually were “Merchants of Death”.

    The U.S. gun companies are no different as they too have become “Merchants of Death”.

    In the old days when I grew up in the 50’s the gun ads were for high quality walnut and blued steel hunting arms, not weapons of mass destruction to annihilate and exterminate your neighbor especially if he was of the wrong race or religion or political party.

    Today the gun industry is vastly changed because it is controlled by the blind greed of the stockholders and it must increase production and sales to satisfy the blind greed of the stockholders with ever increasing dividends. This is a far cry from back in the day when gun companies were family owned and controlled, Winchester and Remington, and later in time Ruger come to mind and there were many others.

    Back “in the day” quality was of paramount concern because family owned gun companies had their reputations to uphold. Gun companies often tested a new model for a year or more before selling it to the public. Recalls were rare as compared to today where the blind greed of the gun industry propels them to release new models without even testing them and then con and sucker the customer into testing their plasticky, MIM cast and stamp sheet metal junk for them which results in endless recalls.

    Today no form of shameful and nefarious advertisement is out of bounds as the gun companies try to sucker in or brainwash or prey on the paranoia of the uneducated and of course their children. They promote the idea that there is a criminal, lunatic, or commie liberal under every rock and to survive one has to have weapons of mass destruction and thousands of rounds of ammo, not for hunting, not for recreation, not for competition but to wipe out your next door neighbors who may have voted democrat or may be non-white or non-christian or be opposed to creating a Christian Caliphate.

    The U.S. has the most guns per person in the world and rather than make society safer has become one of the most violent and unsafe countries to live in. Countries with less firearms ownership and severe vetting for purchasing one, when they do permit ownership, are far safer to live in.

    The gun companies are actually hastening the implosion and destruction of American society which once respected the opposing views of political parties, the separation of church and state and at least the belief that all people had the same constitutional rights (although minorities often got the shaft).

    Abraham Lincoln’s far reaching prediction that America would never be conquered by a foreign nation but would self destruct from within came far sooner than even the Historians and Sociologists would have predicted.

    American is headed for a right wing dictatorship that will mirror and may even surpass the brutal, murderous regime of Hitler and the Nazi’s as the Republican party is now following Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” word for word, and line for line and chapter for chapter. Trump’s success promoting the “big lie” with his glazed eyed stiff armed, brainwashed followers succeeded far better than even the demented Trump would have guessed. Trump himself was so amazed he said “I could shoot and kill someone on 5th Avenue and my ignorant followers would love me all the more”.

    The U.S. has become a society now gone “completely mad” and the “abnormal” has now become the “new normal” while the civilized nations of the world now look on in horror every time they see the endless and daily parade of mass murders in the U.S. by a crazed young man using an assault rifle of mass destruction to shoot up schools and shopping centers. Any nut case can get a second hand weapon of mass destruction with no paperwork and no questioned asked except “give me the money”. Republicans have opposed common sense Universal Background Checks and Safe Storage Laws and the resulting mayhem is now completely out of control.

    • Load of lies. According to your facebook you were not alive in the 50’s. And you have an unhealthy obsession with greta the climate twit. Especially the young greta.

      • The depraved Jethro the Janitor claims he knows all about my personal life by gazing into his crystal ball and listening to the voices in his head. See a shrink Jethro your posts get more bizarre by the minute.

        • jerry p. of Canton Ohio. You were doxxed here. Just because you’re mentally ill enough to think lying about it will make you anonymous again doesn’t make it so.

    • “U.S. gun companies are no different as they too have become ‘Merchants of Death’.”

      death to who?

      answer that question and it all comes clear.

    • I stopped at the almost obligatory “capitalism bad” section.

      To lil’d, only THE STATE can centrally plan production and consumption efficiently. Even when in reality the numbers used were vague to outright fake. Results in a shortage economy.

  19. Seems to me, the best ads/marketing was the 2020 riots, the increase in Asian hate crimes, and the rise of crime in soft on crime blue cities with their defund the police policies.

  22. I was in a CA gun shop right before the scandemic lock downs went nation wide. I was doing the paper work on my new .357.

    At least a dozen men of various ages, all Asian, came in during my time there. Every one of them wanted a Glock. All sold out.

    And that was before things got really bad.

  23. A trained class of kindergarteners or first graders, armed with Crickett rifles would be a very formidable opponent.

    And that is why people like Tom Ammiano got elected the San Francisco School Board so he could destroy the rifle competition program in the school district. Because he as a g@y adult man with no children, is afraid of trained and disciplined kids with guns.

    The anti-civil Rights Movement wants to be in your bedroom. They want to be in your kid’s room. They want to be in every room in your home. They want to be in the classroom.

  24. The “upswell” in violence against asains was NOTTTTT B/C OF “COVID” or whatever the

    writer is trying to insuate

    ASIANS HAVE ROUTINELY been subjected to beatings and assualts by the same group that

    overwhelmingly continued to target them while Covid happend to be present

    its just that THE MEDIA ALWAYS IGNORES BLACK ON OTHERS CRIME

    AND THATS NOT EVEN DEBATABLE

    THE LACK OF HATE CRIMES ATTRIBUTED TO BLACKS vs other groups is wellll known as the

    whole idea of the hate crime as its own category was formed as yet another placating

    to the black community

    so when the covid came around it then presented the “right” time for the msm

    TO USE THE ANTI TRUMP AGENDA TO ITS FULL FORCE AND MEASURE

  25. “…without mentioning that, in 2013, a Kentucky boy of the very same age used the weapon to accidentally shoot and kill his two-year-old sister.”
    Yeah? When I was 5, I tried to suffocate my 3 year old brother with a pillow. What’s your point? Manufacturers are supposed to disclose their products’ body counts? LOL, I can’t wait to see that in a pillow commercial. “Disclaimer: Sometimes, our pillows have been used in attempted suffocations.”

    • Joe:
      I never tried to suffocate anyone with a pillow or anything else for that matter. But I did get into one doozie of a pillow fight at Keesler AFB, when I was in electronics school a very long time ago. I still laugh every time I think about it. Those were the days.

  26. they d. leted my comment for calling out blm as the real cuprit behind the attacks on asians

    instead of the made up stuff the author was trying to imply???!!

    wow!!!

  27. To a certain extent the gun industry does sell fear. As does the news media and the disarmament industry.
    The main thing the anti gun folks are mad about is their own tactics and ideas being used against them.

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