The Trace and Rolling Stone Team Up for Another Hit Piece on the Firearms Industry

The Bloomberg-backed website The Trace has once again partnered with Rolling Stone on a hit piece designed to portray the firearms industry in the worst light possible. 

The headline of the piece promises to reveal “The Gun Industry’s Digital Tricks to Make Buying Guns a Habit,” but the big problem for the anti-gun reporters is that there’s just no “there” there. The Trace got ahold of a May, 2024 marketing webinar from Guns.com’s digital marketing director Will Altherr. If you’ve ever been involved in retail sales or e-commerce, Altherr’s recommendations won’t strike you as unusual, but The Trace/Rolling Stone do their best to make it appear that the firearms industry is engaging in underhand tactics to manipulate prospective customers. 

His presentation, consisting of 13 slides, recommended tools for tracking, customization, and behavior-inducing prompts. Altherr discussed the strategies at length in his remarks, a recording of which was reviewed by The Trace and Rolling Stone. The tactics he described are familiar in the world of online commerce, from food orders to clothes. But the presentation betrayed no consideration of the consequences that may arise if the tactics are applied in a widespread way to the selling of firearms and ammunition.

In other words, the presentation doesn’t show anything nefarious. It’s discussing the same marketing strategies used by a wide variety of industries involved in e-commerce. Ultimately, the objections by The Trace and Rolling Stone boil down to the fact that anti-gunners don’t like guns being sold at all, much less being marketed to prospective customers. 

During the webinar, when Altherr discussed what to do when a customer puts items in their cart and then exits the site, he advised setting up an automated “cart abandonment email.” A tried-and-true method of E-commerce, this would automatically go out to the customer within a few hours, reminding them of their unfinished business. Depending on whether they made a purchase, they could receive another email a short while later.

“Same thing with browse abandonment,” Altherr said in the presentation. “If someone searches a product page one step before adding to the cart, you would want to target them.”

Chances are you’ve seen similar emails or texts like this before. I’ve never gotten one from a gun maker, but there’s a boot company that was so prolific about sending texts like this when I left an item in my cart for awhile that I eventually got so fed up I decided to quit buying from them. These tactics might be annoying to customers, but they must also work to some degree or we wouldn’t see so many companies using them.

The presentation includes three examples of automated emails, all playing up the notion of scarcity, which taps into a gun industry-stoked phenomenon referred to by industry officials as “panic buying.”

One example, designed to address cart abandonment, features a man in a baseball cap peering through the scope of a military-style rifle. “Still Thinking it Over?” it says. “We are holding the contents of your cart as long as we can! Order now before it’s gone!”

Another example depicts a man in an orange winter hat aiming a handgun at a target outside of the frame. “PRICE DROP ALERT,” it says. “We just wanted to let you know the TAURUS G3C you’re interested in is now on sale.” It adds, “Act now before it’s gone…”

A third email refers to a weapon that is “BACK IN STOCK” and includes images of handguns and men holding rifles in the wilderness. “Once sold-out, this customer favorite has returned,” the email says. “Time to get what you’ve been waiting for!”

Panic buying and scarcity marketing are two different things. Panic buying is a widespread reaction to events that could lead to scarcity of a particular product. During the pandemic, for example, no toilet paper companies were running ads or using marketing material telling customers to buy now before supplies ran out, but we still saw a run on those products for months on end. Scarcity marketing is, like it or not, a tried and true tactic that exists in almost every commercial enterprise, from clothing to beers. 

Despite The Trace’s attempt to portray the firearms industry as engaging in underhanded tactics to build up their customer base, all they really showed is that the firearms industry treats e-commerce like every other industry out there. More importantly, The Trace didn’t find anything that suggests the industry is intentionally marketing its products to violent criminals, juveniles, or other prohibited persons. If they had, that would have been front and center in its hit piece. Instead, the worst they could come up with is the fact that, once you’ve put an item in your cart, these companies are going to do their best to close the sale. 

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t exactly strike me as groundbreaking reporting. Maybe it comes as a shock to Rolling Stone readers that the firearms industry is a commercial enterprise like every other industry out there, but I doubt that’s a big surprise to most gun buyers. 

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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