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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
What do you mean by "bad actors"?
In the final big picture, the gun industry is the only industry in America besides the tobacco industry that is not regulated for health and safety by a federal agency. Pesticides come under the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], pharmaceuticals under FDA [the Food and Drug Administration], airplanes under FAA [the Federal Aviation Administration]. You name it, there's an alphabet agency there for it -- except for guns. What that means in the real world is that if you've got a little bit of money [in the gun industry], and very little conscience, you can make virtually anything you want as long as it's not fully automatic, meets certain size restrictions, and is not classified as an assault weapon.
We ban products day in and day out in this country. When I was a kid we played lawn darts. It's basically a giant metal dart that weighs about three pounds, and you would throw it in the dark like horseshoes. Lawn darts killed a couple of people and they were banned. But we lose nearly 20,000 Americans to guns every year and yet some people would argue that that is a fair price to pay.
No one is talking about banning all guns. There is no reason to. But specific categories of firearms basically have a degree of death and injury associated with them that is not warranted. We would argue that this includes handguns, assault weapons, sniper rifles, .50-caliber rifles. The vast majority of guns in this country tend to be your traditional hunting rifles and shotguns. The vast majority of guns in this country are not what the problem is. The problem is, a minority of guns are associated with a disproportionate amount of death and injury.
If we had banned handguns in 1983, then we would have never seen these new trends [in weapons]. We wouldn't have seen the move from six-shot revolvers to these high-capacity pistols. You wouldn't have assault weapons on the market. You wouldn't have had .50-caliber sniper rifles. You wouldn't have a new generation of handguns known as pocket rockets -- which are smaller and more powerful weapons.
There's a perception that the gun industry is static. It makes one product, puts it in the market, and that's it. But the gun industry is more like a shark, looking for the next target.
The traditional white male target market is declining. People are getting older, dying off; they've basically purchased all the guns they're going to buy. So the gun industry has done two things. The first thing is that they've tried to reach out, just like any other industry. Probably the best model would be tobacco. They've targeted women, children and even minorities. I say "even" minorities because there's always been an antipathy toward the minority community if you look at some gun publications.
How do you resell the market? It comes back to the issue of lethality. What has defined the gun industry in this country since the 1980s has been increased lethality, the nicotine of the gun industry. That's what drives the gun industry today.
We read a lot of gun-industry publications, and they're very open about the fact that they're shrinking as a group in this country and the culture is changing. The traditional means by which people enter the gun culture -- hunting, military conscription -- are disappearing. There's a lot of new competition for the children. Kids can sleep late, watch TV, go out and play a video game, versus get up at the crack of dawn, go out in the cold, and use your frost-bitten fingers to fire a weapon that hurts your shoulder and makes a loud noise. That's an easy choice for a lot of kids
So the question is, how can the gun industry attract a new market?
What they're doing is to focus more and more on children. We've done a series of studies that have looked at the very open marketing by the gun industry to kids, to children. We're talking 5-, 7-, 8-year-olds. We've seen kids as young as 5, photos of small toddlers with full auto machine-guns, things like that [in gun publications]. It's an overt effort to normalize the idea of kids and guns. Most people would be shocked to see a child smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer. There is an effort to make sure that the idea of a child and a gun is acceptable.
Have you ever been to a 7-Eleven? Have you ever hung around the magazine rack? I do it all the time. Every time I go to one, a bunch of kids come in and display fairly impressive gun knowledge at most, and interest at the very least.
More than when you were a kid?
Oh yeah. When I was a kid -- I don't want to come across like a cross between Rip van Winkle and Methuselah here -- but the gun culture, as defined by the products that the industry sells, was very different. Back then it was traditional hunting rifles and shotguns. Gun culture in America didn't become a handgun culture until the 1960s, when the handgun population tripled in this country, following the riots.
