One T-shirt featured a cartoon of a horny-looking 50-caliber round holding up a sign that read: “I wanna be inside you!!” But down on the show room, products catered to the darkest reaches the armed American id. In flag-waving speeches the weekend, seeking to deflect public rage from the gun industry, NRA executives held up the rank-and-file members of the association as decent and honorable men and women - first responders, former military, even educators - who simply want to preserve a “human right” to self defense. The real-world use case for these guns isn’t hunting, it’s warfare. The weapons they’re selling are derived from military guns, designed to empower relatively unskilled marksmen kill lots of people as efficiently as possible. There’s a certain honesty to these marketing campaigns. Stag Arms was more explicit, marketing an AR-15 rifle painted in a Hawaiian floral camo it calls the “Aloha.” Nearby, a clothing vendor was selling red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirts with images of AR-15s mixed into the floral print. They dress in loud Hawaiian print shirts and show up at public events armed to the teeth, ready for the outbreak of a conflict they call the Boogaloo or the “Big Luau.”Īn AR- seller called Dark Storm Industries marketed its AR- platform guns with the poster of a menacing, rifle-toting man wearing a tropical button-up shirt. Several vendors even appealed to the unique aesthetic of the Boogaloo movement, a loose collection of meme-driven violent extremists who are prepping for an impending civil war. Stay Ready” - featured semiautomatic shotgun called the “Kaos.” Nemesis Arms, a Kentucky-based gun-maker named after the Greek goddess of retribution, marketed what it dubs “the true survival rifle for big boys.” Gone are the days when gunsellers pretended to be selling benign “modern sporting rifles.” At the NRA show, many brands were trading on dark imagery of societal collapse, pitching military-grade hardware to civilians on the theory that they might find themselves in war zone of a future failed state.īlack Rain Ordnance - whose post apocalyptic logo is the biohazard symbol - was selling an AR painted with the Texas flag and militia-friendly branding, calling the rifle the “Bro – Patriot.” The ejection-port dust flap is printed with the words, “LET IT RAIN.” The booth for Kalashnikov USA - with the prepper-friendly tagline “Be Ready. The “Ghost Gunner” is a computer-operated, tabletop, boring and machining device capable of producing “complete, mil-spec and unregistered AR-15 receiver…in the privacy of your own home.” (A receiver is the regulated part of the modular AR-15 - the part that normally requires a serial number, and can’t be bought at a gun shop without passing a background check.) And this machine, while ostensibly aimed at the DIY enthusiast, could also enable a criminal, prohibited from buying a gun, to produce their own, military-grade weapon. In addition to the expected panoply of pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and AR-15s, the showroom featured one booth with a machine that lets you mill your own, untraceable, gun out of a block of aluminum. And even in the aftermath of the carnage in nearby Uvalde, where 19 children and two adults were massacred by a teenager with an assault weapon, NRA members poured in by the thousands to gawk at the gun industry’s latest, sexiest, deadliest wares. A sprawling gun show - billed as “14 Acres of Guns & Gear” - was the main attraction at the the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Houston this past weekend.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |