In the photo gallery of “The Gun Industry’s Nine Most Outrageous Marketing Ploys” they show the picture below and claim the following:
A Sniper Rifle of His Own
Gunmaker Barrett specializes in selling military-grade, anti-personnel and anti-materiel sniper rifles to couch potatoes who like to imagine themselves as members of the Special Forces. The tagline says it all.
Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/the-gun-industrys-nine-most-outrageous-marketing-ploys-20130228/a-sniper-rifle-of-his-own-0426259#ixzz2yeeR5SyL
First of all, “We’ve Created a Monster” is not a tagline, it’s a headline. A tagline is a line of copy that usually goes under the logo, as in “American Express. Don’t Leave Home Without It” or “Visa. It’s Everywhere You Want to Be.” Great taglines can last anywhere 50-years or longer.
Secondly, there are weapons that are used by BOTH civilians and the military, there are also civilian versions of military rifles. Anti-personnel? Why? Because I can kill people with it? I can do the same with the shotgun Joe Biden wants me to buy. Anti-materiel? Unless it’s a Rambo movie, I doubt shooting a Jeep with it will cause it to blow in a blaze of fire.
Pretty in Pink
Female gun ownership is a third of men’s. To attract lady shooters, the industry’s marketing geniuses are now aggressively pushing pink firearms (see these examples from Sig Sauer and Smith and Wesson). This $140 stock set sold at GunGoddess.com can even make an AR-15 look cute.
Fun for the Kids
The big names in the industry – Ruger, Glock, Bushmaster, you name it– sponsor a magazine called Junior Shooters, which sells children as young as eight on the joys of assault weaponry
Zombie Hunting
To appeal to millennials, the industry has taken a cue from Hollywood and the video game industry, turning shooting ranges into “Zombies” hunts. Zombie Industries markets 3-D dummies of the undead that either “bleed” zombie goo when you shoot them or “burst into little pieces of blood soaked, Zombie matter.” This model is disturbingly called “The Ex.”
This Is Not a Toy
Top ammo makers like Hornady have even gotten into the gamification of guns, marketing a line of bullets called Zombie Max– which they promote with a Hollywood-style promo of a young man firing on human actors at close range with his military-inspired guns. Note the warning on the ammo box.
NRA Enemies, Rolling Stone Friends
When the National Rifle Association’s angry list of famous people and organizations that have lent “notoriety to anti-gun causes” surfaced the other week, we here at Rolling Stone took a keen interest – and not just because our magazine was itself singled out among the publications that have supposedly “assisted in the attack on Second Amendment rights.” (The NRA has since removed the enemies list from its website. It lives on here.)
Like many in the media, we were initially wowed by the extreme lengths that the NRA is determined to hold a grudge. Why would any self-respecting enemies list published in 2013 include Motown stars the Temptations, 1980s Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton or 97-year-old author Herman Wouk?
But as we puzzled over the individuals deemed most threatening to the gun lobby, we were struck by an odd symmetry. In some cosmic sense, is Rolling Stone the yin to the NRA’s yang? Literally dozens – and dozens – of the NRA’s enemies have not only been profiled in the pages of Rolling Stone, they’ve been celebrated on our cover. 61 enemies in all.
Read on to see the NRA enemies from the worlds of music, movies, comedy and television who have made it to Rolling Stone‘s cover through the decades.
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Gregory Smith
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