Using paranoia as ammo, gun lobby targets U.S. consumer

Monday, April 10, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Strip away the emotions and moral concerns about the gun industry and what’s left is a multibillion-dollar business involving a highly competitive group of manufacturers whose existence depends on steady demand for their products.

The problem is that they’ve glutted one of their biggest markets — the U.S., which is home to an estimated 300 million guns — while the percentage of Americans owning guns has hit a 40-year low.

So how do they keep the cash registers ringing?

By using fear-based marketing and public rhetoric spouted by their political lobbying mouthpiece, the National Rifle Association, to convince those who already own guns that they need more, and by trying to create new streams of customers.

Here are some of their tactics:

• Stoking insecurity. Although the rate of violent crime in the U.S. was near a 20-year low in 2016 — down to about half of the high point in 1996 — you wouldn’t know that from looking at gun ads or listening to the NRA. And in addressing the threat of terrorism, the industry’s fear-mongering is off the charts, as in this ad from NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in a 2015 campaign: “You and I didn’t choose to be targets in the age of terror. But innocents like us will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes. No amount of bloodshed will ever satisfy the demons among us. No target is too intimate or too sacred for these monsters. They will come to where we worship, where we educate and where we live.”

• Playing to the “hero complex.” Gun manufacturers would have buyers believe that owning a gun — or five, or 12 — is a way to not only protect themselves and their families, but also stop terrorists and mass shootings. A flip side of this approach is to vilify people who are averse to owning guns. In a 2015 column, NRA board member and dinosaur rocker Ted Nugent called unarmed people the “losers amongst us – spinelessly discarding self-evident truth, logic, common sense and pure human instinct — (who) continue to fall for the big lie of political correctness, and get cut down by murderous maniacs like blind sheep to slaughter.” He closed by writing, “Disarmed and helpless is an irresponsible, suicidal choice that will get you killed. Defend yourself.”

• Portraying the government as an existential threat. Any initiative to regulate gun violence, no matter how rational, is characterized as an attempt by the government to take away Americans’ guns and leave them vulnerable to tyranny. The message works. Gun sales went through the roof during President Barack Obama’s administration, and the industry was laying the groundwork for more paranoia-based sales during the 2016 presidential election. “Under Hillary’s watch, the world has become evermore dangerous, all while Hillary attacks our fundamental right to survive and protect ourselves by eliminating our Second Amendment right of self-defense,” LaPierre said last year during his address at the annual NRA convention. “If she could, Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine, run an entire national security industry into the ground and put your name on a government registration list. Folks, I’m not kidding. If she gets even one Supreme Court nomination … you can kiss your guns goodbye.”

• Trying to arm everybody. Gun makers are working to develop new streams of customers by marketing to women, who traditionally have made up a small percentage of gun buyers, and children. Their tactics include yet more fear-mongering, such as promoting guns as a way to reduce sexual assault.

Gun makers are hardly the only U.S. industry engaged in misleading marketing and questionable sales strategies. But given that there are about 33,000 gun deaths each year in the nation — that’s an average of about 90 a day — what they’re doing is particularly galling.

Although there’s little hope at the moment of countering their messaging with reasonable gun-safety measures at the federal level, Nevada should continue to press for reforms at the state level.