The gun control lobby has spent a lot of time and money over the past few years trying to reinvent itself (at least in the eyes of the public) as a gun safety movement.
They claim to just want “responsible gun ownership,” but their efforts make it harder be a lawful, responsible gun owner. In addition to banning commonly owned arms, the anti-gun movement pushes for laws that make exercising your right to bear arms an expensive and time-consuming process wrought with legal danger and subject to permission by the State.
Then there are the constant attacks on the firearms industry. You can’t have a culture of responsible gun ownership without the ability to acquire a firearm, but gunmakers are the existential enemies of the gun control movement, as we’ve seen with Giffords’ non-stop demonization of “gun industry CEOS”.
Everytown-affilated website Smoking Gun is another project aimed to discredit the gun industry, though its work is often laughable in its outrage. Their latest piece includes a long list of complaints about the firearm industry’s promotions around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Christmas shopping season.
As in years past, gun makers and dealers resorted to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales promotions to bolster their profits. One method for delivering these promotions: email blasts that pepper potential customers, like the kind shown below. This Black Friday, Bushmaster Firearms, known for producing the AR-15s used in the mass shootings in Newtown and Buffalo, sent a marketing email announcing sales while depicting a turkey armed with one such rifle.
A recent Trace and Rolling Stone report explained how gun companies use email marketing to “turn gun buying into a habit.” According to the report, during a May 2024 webinar to NSSF members, the digital marketing director for Guns.com urged gun makers and dealers to rely on mass marketing emails for “big holiday promotion[s],” such as Black Friday sales, for higher “open rates, click-through rates, [and] conversion rates.”
These are the same e-commerce tools and tips deployed by online retailers in every other industry, but it’s somehow more nefarious when it’s gun companies doing it.
During his presentation to NSSF members, the Guns.com marketing director reportedly advised gun companies to take a more targeted approach using “[p]rograms that automatically send emails based off customers [sic] experiences on your website.” He noted, “If someone searches a product page one step before adding to the cart, you would want to target them” with a follow-up email. Similarly, he stressed that if someone abandons their shopping cart before completing a purchase, they should receive more emails to “win back” the sale.
According to The Trace and Rolling Stone, the presentation included “three examples of automated emails, all playing up the notion of scarcity, which taps into a gun industry-stoked phenomenon referred to by industry officials as ‘panic buying.’”
This Black Friday, Guns.com sent out several email blasts, including one warning viewers to “act fast!” before products sold out.
As we previously pointed out, marketing the scarcity of a product is not the same thing as “panic buying.” The former is a marketing technique, while the latter requires no marketing at all. Were toilet paper companies running ads in January and February of 2020 warning customers to stock up while there was still T.P. to be found on store shelves?
They were not, because there was no need to. The same was true for gun companies in 2020; sales soared without any advertisements about limited inventory. Panic buying is a response to outside influences that buyers believe will make products more scarce, not an advertisement proclaiming that supplies are limited.
Smoking Gun even took issue with gun companies offering Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts, calling it a “toxic marketing trend.”
While it is no surprise that gun companies use e-commerce marketing tactics like other industries, the notable difference here is that they are selling deadly weapons that do not offer second chances. Additionally, these online marketing channels are easily accessed by those prohibited from owning guns, including children and teens too young to purchase guns legally.
And? Of all of the things available to minors online, a gun company’s advertisements aren’t even in the Top 100 things to worry about. AI is encouraging kids to commit suicide, hardcore pornography is available with just a few clicks of a mouse, and cyberbullying is so routine we hardly even talk about it anymore, but Smoking Gun is worried that a kid might see a picture of a turkey holding an AR-15 and decide to become a school shooter?
Again, their goal isn’t “responsible gun ownership.” It’s no gun ownership at all. Yes, that involves banning guns, but it also involves destroying a culture of lawful gun ownership, denormalizing gun owners, and demonizing the firearms industry; not just through legislation, but culture war attacks as well.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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