5 Ways the Gun Industry Markets Products to Men's Basest Instincts
Guns make men feel powerful and in control. A pull of the trigger can instantly bring death, giving the shooter an ability that is almost godlike. Yet gun culture does not think gun owners want to feel godly, or even like mature, civilized adults in any sense. They are just human, after all, susceptible to all the basest instincts of human nature. Mass marketing, assisted by social media, shows us how pervasively the gun industry turns gun purchasers into mere animals.
Whether it’s the multimillion-dollar corporations that manufacture guns or the mom-and-pop internet shops that sell every gun accessory imaginable under the sun, the ways in which gun businesses try to sell products to their customers is morally questionable at best, despicably animalistic at worst.
1. Sex, sex, sex
Of all the possible ways to market guns to purchasers, sex might not be the first to come to mind. But even in the world of guns, sex sells. Women’s bodies appear in all facets of gun marketing, from the merchandise reviews that use gun-toting blondes to lure readers, to this shotgun advertisement that looks like it came straight off the cover of a porn parody of Westworld.
Photo Credit: Mother Jones, EEA corp.
2. Fetishizing death
Gun purchasers overwhelmingly claim to buy their weapons for hunting and self-defense—a far greater combined number than those who simply want them to shoot at targets, according to Pew Research Center. They’re designed to maim and kill living things, which explains why all the morbid imagery like skulls and bones are so popular with their owners. But shouldn’t we be at least a little concerned about gun purchasers taking such a fetishized view of death?
3. Childish fear of zombies
Maybe gun lovers don’t actually think lightly of death. Maybe they love skull customization so much because they truly believe in the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It would explain why so many gun accessories feature zombies in some way. Popular products like the Zombie X Chainsaw Bayonet, which has no practical use for game hunters, by the way, appear in endless “zombie apocalypse survival kit” blog posts and infographics. As Pacific Standard points out, many of these zombie-themed products aren’t expensive and are marketed to survivalists who are anxious about undesirable types endangering middle-class Americans.
4. Unyielding patriotism
Blind love for one’s own clan, city, or nation has fueled many an ethnocentric war throughout human history. Nationalism is just a broader-scale version of tribalism, extended to fit our globalized world. This explains why appealing to love of country is a popular move for gun companies, and the American flag and U.S. Constitution (constitutional originalism, anyone?) appear throughout gun culture.
But as patriotic as they may be, if their house is broken into, some gun owners will rely only on themselves, thank you very much, not the public-funded police.
Photo Credit: TeeSpring.com
5. Rampant racism
Not all gun lovers are racists, but there is plenty of white pride rhetoric among Second Amendment advocates, and racism is deeply embedded in the history of that particular clause. Whether they’re proudly proclaiming to be infidels (specifically, enemies of Islam), or arrogantly boasting a “blue lives matter” label, anyone who hopes to sell such products capitalizes on Americans’ racism.
The ties here to the patriotism piece are evident. Racism is an ugly extension of tribalism—one that the gun industry is more than happy to cash in on.
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