How the Gun Industry Targets Kids Using TikTok, Instagram, and Video Games

Mother Jones: A new report exposes the marketing of AR-15s and other firearms to America’s youth…”The gun industry has favored aggressive marketing for more than a decade, as companies realized that vast profits could be made from the increasingly popular AR-15-style rifles. One early Daniel Defense ad suggested civilian buyers could be just like US special forces, overlaying a battlefield scene with the slogan, “Use What They Use.” As I wrote recently in a review of American Gun, a deeply reported new book tracing the history of the AR-15, documents revealed in a lawsuit by Sandy Hook families showed how gunmakers intentionally used brash themes of masculinity and militarism to help sell these weapons. Among such efforts was also the infamous “Man Card” campaign that Remington had used to promote the Bushmaster rifle later wielded by the Sandy Hook mass shooter. Last year, nearly a decade after that massacre, Remington agreed to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. The AR-15 is a weapon of war, originally built for highly efficient killing on the battlefield. (The US military produced it as the M16 during Vietnam.) Its design innovations included firing a relatively small bullet at exceptionally high velocity. As American Gun also details, the inventor of the AR-15 discovered that the .223-caliber projectile became unstable upon impact and “tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels, and bones…The report from Sandy Hook Promise also highlights how ingrained this current gun culture has become with hyper-realistic video games, in which tricked-out guns are “prized commodities” and “players need to rack up sufficient ‘kills’ to ‘unlock’ particular weapons or add attachments to enhance or customize their firearms.In recent years, according to our research at Mother Jones, the AR-15 has become the top weapon of choice for mass shooters—a disturbing trend that has further accelerated in the past 18 months. But apart from efforts by gun lobbying groups to clean up the image of AR-15s by branding them as “modern sporting rifles,” the growing carnage from mass shootings does not appear to have affected the messaging practices of the industry.

That this type of marketing has contributed to creating today’s radical violent extremists is inescapable,” former gun company 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. (Far-right extremism has been a rising factor in mass shootings, according to my research going back to 2018.) Busse also detailed how a Florida firearms retailer used social media to glorify vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who was tried and acquitted after he used an AR-15 to kill two people and wound another during street protests following the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “BE A MAN AMONG MEN” blared the meme, which featured an image of the 17-year-old Rittenhouse armed with the rifle he used in the killings…”