{"id":97221,"date":"2023-10-26T23:51:39","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T04:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=97221"},"modified":"2023-10-26T23:51:39","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T04:51:39","slug":"97221","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=97221","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Mother Jones Gets A Lot Wrong In Its Hit Piece Blaming Makers\u2019 Advertising For \u2018Gun Violence.\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Now comes another in the long line of attacks on the gun\u00a0industry and how it markets its products to customers. The latest is from\u00a0Mark Follman at\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em><\/a>. Apparently attempting to blow the lid off of gun\u00a0makers\u2019 promotional strategies, Follman hangs his hat on a report titled\u00a0UnTargeting Kids<\/a>\u00a0compiled by the\u00a0Sandy Hook Promise<\/a>\u00a0gun\u00a0control operation.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur nation has experienced a tremendous spike in firearm deaths just as gun\u00a0marketing made a transition from selling firearms for hunting and sporting to marketing highly lethal, military-style weapons to civilians, including children,\u201d the report says. \u201cThat marketing is supposedly aimed at adults, but the platforms those influencers appear on, including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, are largely populated by kids.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s only one problem with that. The Sandy Hook Promise report blames \u201cmilitary-style weapons\u201d for the spike in firearm deaths, even though, according to\u00a0FBI data<\/a>, year after year, rifles (of any kind) are used in far fewer homicides than knives.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Follman gets his timing wrong, too. The Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex has been trying to blame gonzo gun\u00a0ads for increased \u201cgun\u00a0violence\u201d\u00a0for more than a decade now<\/a>. But the surge in gun-related homicides didn\u2019t happen until 2020, thanks to the pandemic, the George Floyd Summer of Love, and the deterioration of so many cities thanks to lax law enforcement and permissive \u201cprogressive\u201d criminal justice systems.<\/p>\n

The majority of crimes involving guns are committed by people involved in gangs or drugs, mostly using\u00a0cheap pistols<\/a>\u2026the same as it has been for decades now. So-called \u201cassault weapons<\/a>\u201d have been used in a handful of horrific, high profile mass shootings, but they\u2019re not used in a statistically significant number of gun-related homicides.<\/p>\n

Follman, however, doesn\u2019t let facts get in the way. Instead, he turns to the Gun\u00a0Control Industry\u2019s favorite former insider for his insights . . .<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c\u201cThat this type of marketing has contributed to creating today\u2019s radical violent extremists is inescapable,\u201d former gun\u00a0company executive Ryan Busse argued in The Atlantic, referring to the 18-year-old avowed white supremacist who used a Bushmaster rifle in May 2022 to murder 10 Black people and injure three others at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Except that you don\u2019t see gun\u00a0ads anywhere unless you actively seek them out. There aren\u2019t gun\u00a0TV commercials, there are no gun\u00a0ads in magazines or newspapers, or on most websites. You only see them if you\u2019re already on gun-related websites, read gun-related magazines, or choose to follow gun\u00a0companies on social media (and even there, most platforms throttle their content).<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the inconvenient fact that\u00a0no one has ever proven<\/em>\u00a0that any mass shooter so much as saw one of these allegedly\u00a0edgy ads<\/a>, let alone the more extraordinary claim that a gun\u00a0ad somehow influenced one of them to commit mass murder.<\/p>\n

\n

By the way, Mr. Follman, you should reach out to Mr. Busse and get a comment from him to update your article. Now that he\u2019s running for Governor of Montana, he\u00a0suddenly claims<\/a>\u00a0he doesn\u2019t support an assault weapon ban. How does that square with those prior claims of his?<\/p>\n

Follman\u2019s article includes the usual hand-wringing about the popularity of video games that include guns. But what limited relationship firearm manufacturers had in that area ended over a decade ago. Now developers use popular guns in their games\u00a0without permission or payment<\/a>\u00a0either to or from gun\u00a0companies. So Sandy Hook Promise got what it says it wanted a long time ago. Any inclusion today of popular guns in video games today isn\u2019t the fault of gun\u00a0makers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

So Follman\u2019s piece is riddled with incorrect \u201cfacts,\u201d a faulty chronology, and tries to blame gun\u00a0makers for something they have no control over. That doesn\u2019t make for a particularly effective hit piece. Better luck next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mother Jones Gets A Lot Wrong In Its Hit Piece Blaming Makers\u2019 Advertising For \u2018Gun Violence.\u2019 Now comes another in the long line of attacks on the gun\u00a0industry and how it markets its products to customers. The latest is from\u00a0Mark Follman at\u00a0Mother Jones. Apparently attempting to blow the lid off of gun\u00a0makers\u2019 promotional strategies, Follman … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mendacity","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97222,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97221\/revisions\/97222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}