Firearms Markets,Marketing,and Society

Abstract

This special issue consists of three articles that examine, in turn, the advertising portrayals of women in recent issues of Guns & Ammo magazine, the morality of firearms as discussed by the creators and consumers of Brazilian social media, and the appropriation of Native American characters and language by major U.S. gun companies.

Globally, tens of millions of small arms change hands every year through both licit and illicit channels of distribution. Firearms markets consist of people of all ages, from children to the elderly. They are comprised of men and women, buyers of varying economic status and political leanings, and disparate racial and ethnic groups. Firearms marketing includes the commercial activities of manufacturers, dealers, and traffickers and gains strong support from pro-gun organizations and politicians, online bloggers and social influencers, and popular culture visual and musical representations. Firearms marketing systems can be entirely legal, wholly unlawful, or a hybrid of both arrangements. Shooting injuries and death are the most critical among several negative societal consequences, but firearms marketing also provides livelihoods, satisfactions from hunting and shooting sports, a sense of personal identity, and a feeling of security from perceived and real dangers. Firearms markets, marketing, and society are a worldwide concern and should be an important issue for macromarketing research.

This special issue consists of three articles. The first, “Advertising Frames and the Legitimation of the Armed American Woman,” is by Aimee Huff, Brett Burkhardt, and Michelle Barnhart of Oregon State University. Drawing from institutional theories and concepts of legitimation, their study explores how advertising framing has shifted the meanings assigned to females with guns. Their empirical dataset – 1328 ads from 60 issues of Guns & Ammo magazine published between 2001 to 2020 – was subjected to sophisticated content analysis. Almost no female characters could be found in the period 2001–2007. From 2008 to 2012, in contrast, women appeared more regularly, but in a highly sexualized manner. Then, over the next eight years, ads dropped the tired cheesecake and showed women as more competent with firearms. For the period 2016–2020, the authors describe in more detail four specific frames of shared meaning for female gunners they label the “Serious Student,” “Capable Carrier,” “Domestic Defender,” and “Action Hero.” This article presents numerous tables and figures, and shares striking visual illustrations of the advertising content. Their fine work will not be the last word on women and firearms in the United States, but it makes a solid contribution to the conversation.

Benjamin Rosenthal from FGV EAESP Sao Paulo and Massimo Airoldi from the University of Milan contributed the second article, “Consumer Morality Formation on Social Media: The Case of Guns in Brazil.” Their research poses the essential question of how social media platforms shape consumer morality discourses regarding firearms. Gun violence and homicides have become wicked social problems in Brazil and have sparked hot debates over legal access to firearms by justifiably concerned citizens. The authors analyzed large datasets generated by lay consumers and social media influencers on Twitter and YouTube. Moral discourses, fueled by users displaying and commenting on news and political events, were framed through different worlds of justification that produced alternative explanations for why gun ownership and carrying are (or are not) morally right. Among Twitter consumers, the top three themes were public violence and criminals, political struggles, and citizen rights, whereas political struggles, citizen rights, and the market predominated on YouTube. Neat charts in color show the relative distribution of these moral themes by platform over time. The authors’ methods can be applied to other morality debates of interest to macromarketing scholars.

I wrote the third article “Cultural Appropriation in Historical Context: Native Americans in Firearms Advertising.” Editor-in-Chief Joe Sirgy and Associate Editor Michael Lee handled the reviewing and I had to revise and resubmit like any other author. Cultural appropriation is the repurposing of minority or indigenous cultural identity to serve the ends of a more dominant group. In the United States, whites had long appropriated Native American images and language for marketing purposes, but starting around 1970 growing opposition has forced most companies and non-profit organizations to curtail these practices. This study expands historical understanding of such contested representations by analyzing the advertising of three major firearms manufacturers – Savage, Remington, and Winchester – that periodically exploited American Indian images and language from the late nineteenth century into the present. The gun companies copied the tropes appearing in U.S. advertising more generally, but unlike other industries, they only used Native men and boys as trade characters. The discussion section unpacks some of the psychological effects and questionable ethics of these portrayals, as well as the larger historical arc of American Indian cultural appropriation.

These three articles intersect and diverge in several ways. Methodologically speaking, Huff, Burkhardt, and Barnhart, as well as Rosenthal and Airoldi, deploy different types of quantitative content analyses with additional qualitative interpretation, whereas Witkowski presents historical narrative based on close examination of primary visual sources understood through their original societal and marketing contexts. The theoretical foundations of these studies range from processes of institutional legitimation to morality discourse formation to cultural appropriation as a phenomenon exhibiting a historical evolution. Huff et al. and Witkowski analyze traditional advertising placed by companies, whereas Rosenthal and Airoldi focus on social media platforms where consumers have something to say. The countries of interest, the United States and Brazil, both have robust and highly politicized gun cultures and, sadly, altogether too much gun violence.

It is hoped that the articles published in this special issue will encourage macromarketing scholars to further explore firearms marketing systems and their social significance – in these and in additional countries, today and in the past – by applying different methodologies and a variety of theoretical and policy perspectives.