AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

The High Points:

• Gun control groups rebrand as “safety” advocates while undermining lawful gun ownership.

• Critics attack normal firearm marketing practices as sinister or dangerous.

• Anti-gun activism aims to delegitimize gun culture and the firearms industry entirely.

You almost have to admire the creativity of the gun control lobby. They’ve spent years insisting they’re just here for “responsible gun ownership,” yet every policy, every campaign, every op-ed makes it harder for anyone to actually be a responsible gun owner. They demonize the tools, the people who make them, and even the companies that dare to run the same Black Friday emails every other retailer on the planet sends out. Apparently, if Bushmaster puts a cartoon turkey holding an AR-15 in a holiday promo, civilization is teetering.

This is what happens when an entire movement decides that the industry itself must be erased. They can’t win on facts, so they try to poison the culture—turn gun ownership into something suspect, shameful, or dangerous by default. And the pearl-clutching over marketing—scarcity emails, abandoned cart reminders, normal retail tactics—shows how flimsy their outrage has become. This isn’t about safety. It’s about elimination.

From Bearing Arms:

The gun control lobby has spent a lot of time and money over the past few years trying to reinvent itself (at least in the eyes of the public) as a gun safety movement.

They claim to just want “responsible gun ownership,” but their efforts make it harder be a lawful, responsible gun owner. In addition to banning commonly owned arms, the anti-gun movement pushes for laws that make exercising your right to bear arms an expensive and time-consuming process wrought with legal danger and subject to permission by the State.

Then there are the constant attacks on the firearms industry. You can’t have a culture of responsible gun ownership without the ability to acquire a firearm, but gunmakers are the existential enemies of the gun control movement, as we’ve seen with Giffords’ non-stop demonization of “gun industry CEOS”.

Everytown-affilated website Smoking Gun is another project aimed to discredit the gun industry, though its work is often laughable in its outrage. Their latest piece includes a long list of complaints about the firearm industry’s promotions around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Christmas shopping season.

As in years past, gun makers and dealers resorted to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales promotions to bolster their profits. One method for delivering these promotions: email blasts that pepper potential customers, like the kind shown below. This Black Friday, Bushmaster Firearms, known for producing the AR-15s used in the mass shootings in Newtown and Buffalo, sent a marketing email announcing sales while depicting a turkey armed with one such rifle.

A recent Trace and Rolling Stone report explained how gun companies use email marketing to “turn gun buying into a habit.” According to the report, during a May 2024 webinar to NSSF members, the digital marketing director for Guns.com urged gun makers and dealers to rely on mass marketing emails for “big holiday promotion[s],” such as Black Friday sales, for higher “open rates, click-through rates, [and] conversion rates.”

These are the same e-commerce tools and tips deployed by online retailers in every other industry, but it’s somehow more nefarious when it’s gun companies doing it.

During his presentation to NSSF members, the Guns.com marketing director reportedly advised gun companies to take a more targeted approach using “[p]rograms that automatically send emails based off customers [sic] experiences on your website.” He noted, “If someone searches a product page one step before adding to the cart, you would want to target them” with a follow-up email. Similarly, he stressed that if someone abandons their shopping cart before completing a purchase, they should receive more emails to “win back” the sale.

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