OPINION: American gun culture is a tub of toxic masculinity. But female gun owners are more likely to support gun safety measures, including training and background checks, writes Rich Barlow.
If marketers and the high court won’t protect kids, our best hope may be a little-noticed trend: the feminization of gun-owning. First, some background.Skeptics who think “toxic masculinity” is woke myth-making should check out gun ads. Last year, after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murdering two antiracist protesters, a gun dealer in Florida crafted an ad with him cradling an assault rifle. These words graced the shot of the 17-year-old boy: “BE A MAN AMONG MEN.
It’s part of a national marketing pitch in which gun makers and sellers stress “self-defense, machismo, and an overarching sense of fear,” afound. The marketing and lobbying efforts, the Times reports, rests on bucks and schmucks. The Times put it more diplomatically, citing the “commercial and political imperative” of gun industry profits and gun nuts’ dream of an armed populace. Recall: unpermitted, concealed carrying of handguns is legal in half the country.
“Using Madison Avenue methods,” the Times says, “the firearms industry has sliced and diced consumer attributes to find pressure points -- self-esteem, lack of trust in others, fear of losing control -- useful in selling more guns.” In a paradigm-setting 2012 ad in Maxim magazine, Bushmaster, the company that manufactured the rifle used in the racist massacre in Buffalo in May, declared, “Consider your man card reissued.
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