Bad firearms marketing has given the U.S. a national nightmare
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
When you look at murder rates, they are concentrated in certain demographic groups and certain areas of the country.
There are plenty of areas awash in guns that dont have high murder rates.
Obviously more guns will lead to more murders (or suicides) via guns. But they are not a cause of the murders.
Illegal drugs, poverty, messages of hopelessness are the cause of high murder rates. Sensationalized coverage of school shootings and untreated mental illness are likely the cause of school shootings.
Firearms marketing is basically only visible to anyone who already is sufficiently interested in firearms (or activities pertaining to them) to seek it out in magazines or on the walls of gun stores. To assert that the sorts of marketing materials the author describes is somehow a cause of gun violence to any significant degree (at all, let alone moreso than socioeconomic factors like financial hardship and mental health issues) is a pretty blatant inversion of causality for that reason. The one exception might be video games, and that's still a stretch when you consider how far removed the in-game performance of "real world" weapons tends to be from reality (and is pretty squarely debunked when you remember that all those attempts to link video games with violence have been pretty thoroughly refuted when examined with even the slightest bit of scientific rigor).
No, socioeconomic inequality and the ownership class' success in convincing the working class to take it out on themselves has given the US a national nightmare.
And don't even get me started on the conflation of "likes guns" with "right wing". There are leftist gun owners, contrary to what the author wants to portray.
Who ever sees firearm ads unless you buy firearm or hunting magazines?
And I love how he ignores the fact that gun control laws have only gotten more strict since the 60’s, yet gun deaths have increased.
I think it’s reasonable to claim that firearm marketing has increasingly pushed “bigger” and “more” over the last decade. It’s also made a fashion (“tacticool”) out of firearm ownership.
Whether these are good or bad things can be discussed, but I don’t think the authors claims should be blown off.
His arguments are further blown apart with the contrast of the recent tragic events in Indiana vs. Texas.
And then he makes the leap of presuming that an aesthetic within the enthusiast community is driving a surge in mass murder. Frankly, the opposite seems more likely to me: that the shift in manufacturer focus is meeting a rising demand created by a fracturing society.