Guns, profit, bias, and our Great Divide

A few days ago I mentioned the Confederate Flag and its place as America’s unique hate symbol. My intention for today was to follow up on that, as many folks do not understand what led up to secession and how completely and thoroughly and exclusively the Civil War was all about maintaining the southern system of human bondage. Spoiler alert! States’ Rights wasn’t even a thing. But I’m going to put that on the back burner for a few days because I got distracted by an article in The Atlantic about gun advertising that I really want to bring to your attention.

You’ve heard me say that racism crops up everywhere. I used to have a friend in Texas, whom I’ll call Kerby, that would say I saw racism everywhere I look. And I do. Because it crops up everywhere I look. One of the key reasons that we’ve moved so slowly on eradicating America’s ‘Race Thing’ is that so many white Americans think that it’s been conquered, or that it is not much of an issue anymore. So part of my mission here is to expose it. It’s hard to fight against something that you think doesn’t exist.

I started reading this article because the lede, The gun industry created a new consumer. Now it’s killing us, was interesting. I didn’t go into this expecting to find any correlation to race. I was just out back enjoying my coffee, the still-cool air,  and the early morning sun.

The general premise of the article was that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, gun manufacturers used to target their ad campaigns to sportsmen. Some, like Ruger, even used to go so far as to position themselves as manufacturers for responsible citizens. 

But around 2008, manufactures began to experiment with using sexy images of young women to capture the attention of young men. It worked, of course, and the industry began to attract a new demographic – young men with a lot of years left to consume, a fascination with guns, and money.

The campaign ratcheted up another notch when Bushmaster - maker of the well-known AR-15, the civilian version of one of the weapons that I used in Vietnam, the M-16, and of the rifle that the Sandy Hook shooter used to kill 20 six and seven years old’s and six teachers - unleashed its “Man Card” campaign unleashing the first vestiges of subtle racism. “The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded”. Last of a dying breed…isn’t that what Tucker Carlson so relentlessly pushes in his Great Replacement theory? Brown hordes coming to America to replace white people? Isn’t that what the murderer in Buffalo was also claiming in his manifesto as he murdered 19 people with his manly-man Bushmaster XM-15?

In the early 2000’s, over 10 years into America’s longest war, and with the post-Vietnam, ubiquitous, over-used, “Thank you for your service” adulation of all things militarily heroic, gun company Daniel Defense began to focus on AR-15 style assault rifles, encouraging young men to drool from the message of being “On par with U.S. Special Forces”, because all it takes to imagine yourself a special forces badass is a certain gun. Daniels Defense scoured a coup when their own version of the AR-15, the DDM4 V7 was featured on the cover of the Popular Mechanics 2016 “Tough Guy” issue. The DDM4 V7 was the gun the Uvalde shooter used to murder 19 little kids and two of their teachers.

And whereas there was no racist rhetoric in any of the Daniel Defense ads, neither did they feature nor attempt to stimulate anything other than white men.

Subtle racism began to worm its way deeper into gun advertisements again in 2018 when another AR-15 manufacturer, Spike’s Tactical, began running ads where the bottom line message was: “Acquire an AR-15 to protect yourself against Antifa”…as you protest for white supremacy. Antifa was relatively unknown before the white supremacist Unite The Right racist rally in Charlottesville VA in 2017. Antifa – anti fascist - protests against and physically fights with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Boogaloo Bois, and other organizations widely recognized as white supremacist organizations. Gun manufacturers were now actively appealing to the racist element of the far right.

In August, 2020, 17 year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-15 style rifle, shot and killed two people in Kenosha WI and wounded another. The protest were race-based after a police officer there had shot a Black man 7 times – 4 in the back – paralyzing him for life. This was exactly the call to arms that Spike Tactical had advocated and advertised for two years earlier. It’s hard to believe there is not a direct, race-based link.

Rittenhouse was charged and acquitted of assault. Big Daddy Unlimited a major gun retailer, posted on social media a large poster in support of Rittenhouse, of a soldier in camo clothing and emblazoned with, “Be a man among men.” Racism again. “Be a man among men” was the slogan of the Rhodesian army.

Dylan Roof, who murdered nine parishioners in a church in South Carolina, was photographed wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Rhodesian Flag, a symbol displayed by many white supremacist organizations. “Be a man among men”, the Big Daddy social media posts was a Rhodesian Army recruiting slogan. The Rhodesian Army fought Black insurgents in order to maintain white control in what is now known as Zimbabwe and what was then a white supremacist regime that was more racist even than South Africa.

Zimbabwe fell apart under the rule of Black African Robert Mugabe, and white supremacist now use that as an example of the superiority of white rule and the inferiority of Black rule. “Be a man among men” and “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia again” have become popular white supremacist slogans and are emblazoned on white supremacist and far-right apparel.

Wilson Combat, an Arkansas gunmaker, is all set to take advantage of public anxiety about civil strife, advertising an AR-15 model marketed as the Urban Super Sniper. “There are times when extreme accuracy and rapid follow-up shots are the most important criteria when selecting a rifle,” “Urban”…code word for Black. The full, coded message here is, “Buy one of our AR-15’s and be prepared to kill Black people and their white supporters.”

Live Q or Die, a company in NH, has begun selling QAnon-branded AR-15s. QAnon is widely regarded as a conspiracy-mongering, white supremacist organization. The ‘Q’ is stamped on the receiver.

Another company, Palmetto State Armory, has used imagery clearly designed to appeal to the Boogaloo Bois, which the FBI has identified as a far-right, domestic terrorist threat, with products such as their AK-47 style pistol decorated in a “Big Igloo Aloha” pattern that resembles the group’s signature aloha shirts.

Palmetto State Armory—which is both a major retailer that sells traditional brands like Smith & Wesson and a manufacturer in its own right, produces tens of thousands of firearms each year.

I couldn’t recall any Black mass murderers – one event where four or more people other than the shooter are killed. So I Googled images of mass murderers in the U.S. Dozens of images came up. None were Black. Now you know why. The gun industry is deeply complicit in creating, maintaining, and profiting from our great divide. And the hell of it is it’s probably not even intentional - so deeply imbedded in America are our views and our ignorance on race.

And just in case you’re thinking I’m an anti-gun, liberal snowflake…I’ve never not owned a gun since I was 14 or so. I’m a combat Marine Corps Vietnam helicopter machine gunner. I was a qualified Sharpshooter each of the four years I served. And I left Vietnam with the usual campaign ribbons but also with well-earned Combat Aircrew wings and an Air Medal.

Oh, and before I forget…today I saw this article, below, about how Pulse oximeters, that gizmo that your doctor puts on the end of your finger to measure your respiratory rate and the amount of oxygen in your blood – yep, it’s sensitive to skin color and was designed to only accurately measure light-colored skin. Black lives do matter somewhat. Just not as much as white lives.

So there you go Kerby - if you think I see racial bias everywhere I look, it’s because it IS everywhere I look.

Many thanks today to The Atlantic, from where I derived much of the information for this post.

Read all about pulse oximeters here.

And now, shameless plug time: I hope that you enjoy these posts and are learning from them. If we don’t close this Great Divide that America is in the throes of and is based so much on race, this will be a country that you won’t want your kids or grandkids growing up into. It’s already becoming unrecognizable right in front of your eyes. You already hate reading the daily news. You’ve asked yourselves a million times, “How did we get here? What can I do?” These post are free, but our work has a cost, and it has value. The Civil Conversations Project isn’t in it just to make noise…to pat ourselves on the back and pretend we’re making a difference. We’re in it to substantially move the damned needle. If JFK can challenge the country to go to the moon and 9 years later we’re strolling around on it…if we can eradicate small pox and polio and so many other diseases in just one generation…if we can develop a vaccine in less than a year that took the lives of over a million of us, we can sure as hell dramatically reduce racism. That thing that I’ve bene hiring for my entire life, “Well, this takes times”…we’re calling bull s**** on that. We can dramatically narrow our Great Divide. So please help us out. Donate…generously. Thanks.