I wasn’t actually familiar with that specific ad, no…however, I’m pretty familiar with that line of advertising, since we see it all the time in myriad products. Do a Google search on ‘Corvette ads aimed at men’ and you will see it…or ‘Camel cigarette ads aimed at men’ (with camel toe Joe :p)…or, hell, just ‘advertising aimed at men’. I don’t see anything different between the man card thingy and a host of other products advertised towards men, ranging from light beer to power tools.
Again, I’m failing to see the issue or why it’s riling folks up.
It’s not really that difficult. Guns are different from Corvettes and cigarettes.
Cigarettes can’t be used as weapons. I suppose Corvettes could be, but they rarely are, and they’re not culturally associated with killing.
Guns are designed to kill and injure. Yes, they can be used for other things but those other things are not the main intention. Target shooting or hanging on a wall to show off is not what they were invented for. They were invented to injure or kill, either animals or people. There’s a whole cultural mystique around them specifically about shooting people. When I see arguments about gun rights, I rarely see mention of hunting or target shooting. What I see is talk about either self-defense, overthrowing the government (which is stupid), or vigilantism (which is also stupid).
Hunting and target shooting are fine, but that is not what these ads are about. Anyone who grew up in this country can see that as plainly as the nose on their face. I think that, for some people (I’m not saying you) there’s a willful refusal to see that because a large part of their argument is that “guns are tools like hammers or screwdrivers” as if there’s no difference between shooting someone and building a shed.
What they were invented for has nothing to do with their current popularity. Very few guns (outside the military) ever kill anything. Their main “intention” is to sell, to appeal to the gun buyer. The main* uses* are: target shooting, collecting , just having to feel safe and hunting. Killing people is so far down the list that you might as well say cars are 'designed" to kill people.
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It’s not really that difficult. Guns are different from Corvettes and cigarettes.
Cigarettes can’t be used as weapons. I suppose Corvettes could be, but they rarely are, and they’re not culturally associated with killing.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see the relevance, so it IS ‘that difficult’. Probability wise, which is more likely to kill me, guns or cigarettes? If we look at deaths per 1000 (since Corvettes make up a very small percentage of the overall makes of vehicles, even in the US :p), I’m pretty confident Corvettes are more dangerous than guns as well, especially if we remove the suicide (obviously YOU are more dangerous to you in the case of suicide, regardless of the tool you choose).
I’m unsure why you think it matters that guns are weapons while the other products aren’t wrt advertising and the point we were actually discussing. Advertisers target specific groups with their ads. Targeting of males of various age groups is one of the things they do (as they do with females of various age groups). shrug
How often are guns ACTUALLY used, in the US, for self-defense or overthrowing the government? How many of the 30k deaths annually in the US are due to either of those things? How many of them are accidental shootings or suicides?
For a whole culture and mystique around shooting people and overthrowing the government, and the 100’s of millions of guns and 10’s of millions of gun owners it sure seems, to me at least, that a dispassionate look at the actual numbers shows that guns are a relatively minor cause of actual deaths, far below other sanctioned items in the US…such as cigarettes or alcohol. I mean, if you take away suicide (which is approximately half of the total, and IMHO is a sunk cost…i.e. the suicide rate isn’t going to substantially change regardless of whether you have guns or not, the method will simply shift to something else. The US, btw, is about in the middle of the pack wrt developed nations and the rate per 100k of suicide, despite us having those 100’s of millions of guns and 10’s of millions of gun owners, etc etc), gun deaths in the US are only about 10k per year on average and have actually been dropping, even though there are more guns in the US. 10k SOUNDS like a lot (or even 30k), but think about the numbers for just a moment…we have 300+ MILLION citizens, and probably something like 400+ million guns. There are something like 100 million gun owners in the US. Yet despite this culture of shooting em up and cowboy-ism and despite access to guns (and despite the fact that America is just a violent place wrt most of the rest of the world), those numbers are pretty paltry in comparison.
As with a lot of things, societies decide what are acceptable risks. Change the speed limit upward and additional people will be killed or injured. Allow people who are 18 to buy alcohol and you’ll have additional deaths or injuries…or allow people at all to buy the stuff and you will have additional deaths and injuries. Allow people access to tobacco products and you are accepting a LOT of additional deaths and injuries. And have an established right to keep and bear arms and you accept, as a society, that this will mean you will have additional deaths and injuries due to that gun ownership. As a society we have chosen, to this point, to allow that (with restrictions) right to continue. At some point, as a society, perhaps we will feel the cost is too much. We tried that with alcohol, and it worked…less people died from alcohol during Prohibition than before or after. But we, as a society and despite that fact decided that the cost in lives was worth allowing people the ability to buy and use alcohol. Currently we as a society are slowly strangling tobacco use, and that will certainly result in less deaths due to tobacco…maybe we will do the same with guns at some point.
But actually it does. It does infer macho, certainly. But they are selling guns to guys who will never use them to kill and never intend to use them to kill.
How is this any different than trying to make me think that by drinking Miller Lite and watching football I will have great friends, live in a nice house with a decked out man cave, be in good shape, and have a hot looking supermodel girlfriend beside me (also drinking Miller Lite) and rooting for my favorite team?
It does exactly what advertising is supposed to do.
Now, if the ad showed a guy driving down the road drinking a 40oz. Miller Lite out of a paper bag, that would be a bad thing. If Bushmaster said that its rifle would kill 47% more school children than the nearest competitor, that would also be very bad.
But puffing up a product to appeal to a target demographic? When everyone else does it it is okay, but for evil gun companies it is bad?
“Finally, always keep in mind that mass shootings in public places should not be the main focus in the gun debate, whether for gun control or gun decontrol: They on average account for much less than 1 percent of the U.S. homicide rate and are unusually hard to stop through gun control laws (since the killer is bent on committing a publicly visible murder and is thus unlikely to be much deterred by gun control law, or by the prospect of encountering an armed bystander). Still, people had asked for examples of some shootings in which a civilian armed with a gun intervened and brought down the shooter, so here is what I found.”
No… I’m speaking of the speed at which the gun itself cycles. Sure, the human finger is a limitation… Except that there are little motorized spinners (illegal) that you can put into the trigger guard to push the trigger much faster than a human can. They turn a semi-automatic weapon into something indistinguishable from a fully-automatic weapon. These are limited by the intrinsic cycle rate of the gun itself.
This kind of modification is why I am leery of guns with very fast cycle rates.
No; don’t be obtuse. I want limitations on the sale of weapons themselves that have very high cycle rates, to avoid the ease of this kind of modification.
I don’t know if you already understand this or not, but all semi-automatic guns have “very high cycle rates” and about half of the guns sold today are semi-automatic.
The flow between laws and culture is always two-way. And it’s often iterative–a shift starts, either with legislation (because a group of lawmakers decides to change things), or as you say the cultural attitude shifts, and then there’s a shift in the complement–the law or the culture–and so on. Harm-prevention measures for instance often start in the legislature, because they’re often accompanied by restrictions people don’t like. And consider this question, If race laws hadn’t changed, would the cultural attitude toward racial discrimination have improved as rapidly? (or, more cynically, would our culture have been better off without any race laws?)
“Win” and “culture war” and “coercively” are too loaded for practical use here. Something good for TV sound bites, but that’s about it. Can’t emphasize enough that American culture is everyone’s, including those elements in it involving guns.
And to be clear, I’m not after “gun culture”. I’ve used the term “gun culture” before, but now avoid it like the plague. It’s too loaded with its traditional meaning, implications of gun-worshiping rituals, secret meetings at gun clubs, and so on (I’m ridiculing the traditional use of the term “gun culture”, mind you, not gun owners). Do you see the difference between that term and what I mean by America’s overall cultural attitude, the narratives, expectations, values, mores, regarding guns?
No argument here.
Here’s where I disagree strongly (no surprise). I think statements like that are an effect of a (yes) cultural myopia. For instance, why aren’t mass shootings as frequent in other countries? What significant variables are in play other than the culture? Why on earth do assault weapons keep turning up in the hands of these butchers, other than owing to connotations, American-cultural and otherwise, as mass killing tools? Can anyone see what’s meant when someone uses the term cultural malignancy, especially with the high chance these shootings perpetuate themselves? And how might one suppose doing nothing after an atrocity with a body count of fifty gets parsed by the culture? Say, oh I don’t know, as permissive?
