The purpose of an ad is to sell a product. That means you need to appeal to your potential customer base. For the firearm industry, that means a lot of things, including hammering on things like reliability, rate of fire, and other things gun buyers are looking for in a firearm.
And the gun industry has done just that.
However, those ads have been under fire for some time because bad people do bad things, and someone out there decided that the reason they did it was because the gun industry’s ads don’t make anti-gunners feel warm and fuzzy.
Now, a group of reported mass shooting victims is asking the Fourth Circuit to come down hard on the gun industry over them.
The Fourth Circuit heard from the victims of a mass shooting who hope to hold firearm manufacturers liable for their injuries.
On April 22, 2022, 23-year-old Raymond Spencer of Virginia barricaded himself in his Washington, D.C. apartment and fired over 230 rounds at Edmund Burke College Preparatory School. Spencer later killed himself, but not before severely injuring Karen Lowy and security guard Antonio Harris.
Harris, Lowy and her 13-year-old daughter sued 14 firearm industry members, including gun, weapon accessories and ammunition manufacturers. The plaintiffs claim that the industry members should bear responsibility for marketing tactics aimed at impressionable young men, in which they depict their products as tools of war despite selling them to civilians.
“All of whom have brought suit against manufacturers of AR-15 weapons, ammunition and accessories based on their deceptive and misleading advertising which glorified and promoted their products for militaristic and illegal purposes to a young man who then replicated exactly what he saw in defendant’s advertising,” attorney Liz Lockwood of Ali Lockwood, representing the victims, told the three-judge panel. “He packed his AR-15s in his car, set up a sniper’s den across from a school from high above, looked down his scope and targeted the cars in the pickup line.”
One advertisement from gun manufacturer Daniel Defense posted on Instagram shows a person on a rooftop aiming a scope at a car on the street below, much like what occurred at the school shooting. A Virginia-based federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last year after ruling the victims lacked standing as they failed to show that the defendants’ speech caused their injuries.
And that should happen again, to be fair, because the ads are seen by hundreds of thousands, at a minimum, and most people do no such thing. Just showing a rooftop gunman aiming at a car isn’t enough to tip anyone over the edge toward anything unless they were already teetering in that direction.
Plus, I’m not so sure how well they can prove the shooter actually saw the ads in the first place. Many of these claims of advertising being responsible for mass shootings fail to even show a connection between the ads in question and the killers who were supposedly inspired by them.
Hell, a similar scenario has played out on every cop show in the 21st century. Why isn’t Hollywood also jammed up over this?
Maybe because it’s not really about inspiring shootings, but about punishing the gun industry for not capitulating to anti-gun demands over the years. The anti-Second Amendment bunch would love nothing more than to hamstring the firearm industry into not advertising their products at all. As it is, they’ve largely pushed their ads into certain corners of the media. They really only advertise to those who are interested in being advertised to. They’re not reaching an audience that doesn’t have some connection to the gun culture.
And now they want to hamstring their marketing efforts even more, probably in hopes of running them out of business forever, all because some jackwagon did something awful while millions of other gun owners did no such thing.
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