GVPanorama: How the Firearms Industry Markets Its Militarized Weapons
A startling slideshow of modern gun marketing
While on the search for recent gun violence prevention news for our weekly "Friday Finds” feature, we often come across editorials, personal stories, or wider-lens articles that don’t necessarily fit into a current events window. With GVPanorama, we highlight some of these thought-provoking pieces.
An even casual awareness of the gun industry’s marketing impetus over the last few decades has shown a dark slide down from promoting dad/son hunting trips and basic home security into a focus on a far more fear-based (and profitable) militarization of gun ownership.
More powerful guns, the gear that goes along with them, and a pathologically skewed vision of “patriotism” have suffused an increasingly dystopian, destructive industry not satisfied with just selling hunting rifles and orange vests.
The Violence Policy Center is a D.C.-based nonprofit that “works to stop gun death and injury through research, advocacy, and education.” Their Campaign for Gun Industry Accountability project recently posted these excellent, if extremely chilling, slideshows exposing how the gun industry hypes their increasingly lethal weaponry.
The images come from “magazine ads, manufacturer catalogs and websites, or the content of firearm magazines that cater to gun owners.” And the language surrounding the pictures further illuminates — and no doubt hopes to increase — the industry’s appeal to the darkest fears of its customers.
Check out the full article here.
Top image of gun ad via Campaign for Gun Industry Accountability.