Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas - 19 children and 2 adults dead

At a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Wednesday, Ryan Busse, a former gun industry insider who regularly speaks out about the decisions and tactics that flooded the United States with military-style rifles, put up a photo of a banner from a recent gun show.


It depicted a Revolutionary War soldier firing an AR-15. The caption read, “Gear for your daily gunfight.”


It is this kind of marketing that turned the AR-15 into an enormous cash cow for the firearms industry.

As a new report from the committee demonstrates, this weaponry is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales, with marketing tactics aimed at young men anxious about their masculinity.

Busse’s testimony and the information the committee gathered showed just how committed the gun industry — and the Republican Party — have become to putting military-style weapons into civilian hands, no matter how many lives it costs.

But they also showed that undoing what has been done, or even stopping it from getting worse, will be next to impossible.


Right now, a bill to outlaw new sales of military-style weapons is moving through the House; the Judiciary Committee approved it on a party-line vote last week. President Biden has endorsed a ban.


But in highlighting the ubiquity of these deadly weapons, the Oversight Committee’s report and the testimony highlighted the very factor gun advocates, including those on the Supreme Court, will use to insulate these guns from regulation.


As Busse testified, the industry markets AR-15s by telling people they can “use what the Special Forces guys use,” and by getting guns featured in movies and in first-person-shooter video games.

Busse said: “The industry condones frightening marketing that openly partners with domestic terror [organizations] like the Boogaloo Bois, a group that hopes for race wars and wears Hawaiian shirts."

And the committee’s report does show how one company sells an AR-15 adorned in a Hawaiian shirt pattern, called the “Big Igloo Aloha” rifle. “Big Igloo” is a social media variation of “Boogaloo.”


All this adds up to an industry that quite consciously markets its products not as a way to responsibly defend your home, but as an instrument of murder and mayhem……


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/gun-industry-whistleblower-testimony-despair/