I write this a few days after fifty worshipers in two New Zealand mosques were murdered with an assault rifle. In the same week, America's Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the parents of twenty murdered six-year-olds could sue Remington Arms, not for manufacturing the Bushmaster assault rife that killed them, but for using advertising that targeted immature and unstable gun buyers, such people representing a sizeable segment of America's gun culture.
Specifically, at the time of the shootings, the Bushmaster website featured a list of promotional manhood questions that prospective customers could answer in order to qualify for a “temporary man card” (a permanent card being issued upon the purchase of an assault rifle), so when I heard of the recent court decision, I went to Bushmaster.com to look for those questions. As expected, I didn't see them, so I clicked on Live Chat, only to be promptly disconnected when I said what I wanted. I clicked on Live Chat a second time, and the conversation proceeded as follows:
Bushmaster: Hello, how can I help you?
Me: How do I get my temporary man card?
Me: I read that visitors to Bushmaster were asked a series of
questions following which they received a temporary man card? Is this no
longer true?
Bushmaster: No.
Me: So what is true?
Chat session disconnected.
I again tried to find the questions offsite, but the best I could come up with was a series of screen shots: https://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/bushmasters-shockingly-awful-man-card-campaign.
Here are a few of the qualifying (or maybe I should say disqualifying) questions, some abbreviated in my words and some right off the site:
Do you eat tofu? Can you change a tire? Do you own a small dog? Is your inner light best represented by a kitten, a candle, or an assault rifle? Do you wear hemp clothing? Have you ever watched figure skating “on purpose?” “What would you do if you were on your way to a championship sports competition and a car
full of the rival team’s fans cuts you off in traffic?” (The correct answer? “Skip the game, find the other car in the parking lot, and render it
unrecognizable...”)
Bushmaster warned applicants that their manhood cards could be revoked by other men for being a “crybaby,” a “coward,” a “cupcake,” ”on a short leash,” owning a
small dog, installing a sissy bar on an ATV, skipping poker night to watch a musical, uttering the words, “I will _____ if she lets me,”or being in some other way
“unmanly” (the word was represented by a woman in a skirt).
I later browsed newsgroups related to the Bushmaster ad campaign. On one of them, a Brit had written, “You Yanks are sick fucks. No wonder the whole world hates you,” but what use does a country that owns one gun per person (second place goes to Serbia with 0.75 guns per person) have for the respect of the people in the other 195 nations of the world?
Remember the question about how a manly man would react to being cut-off in traffic? The answer assumed that a real man would miss the game in order to wreak vengeance, but how would he find the courage to risk confrontation with a “car full” of other men? He would be carrying a gun that, out of the box, has a fire rate of 45 rounds per minute, but that with a cheap modification can fire 10 rounds per second. According to the American definition, a real man doesn't really need intelligence, courage, nobility, goodwill, a respect for law and order, or even marksmanship, because he is driving down the highway with a weapon that, within seconds, can cut scores of people to pieces at no risk to himself, that is unless his intended victim is another real man who whips out his own assault rifle.
Adam Lanza, the Connecticut school shooter, lived with his mother. He had no job, no friends, no ideals, and showed no kindness to anyone. He murdered his mother, six school employees, and 20 first graders, yet, according to Remington Arms, he became a real man the moment he put his money on the counter for an assault rifle. Yes, we Americans are sick fucks in that we equate masculinity with anger, violence, misogyny, and vengefulness (our president embodying all of these things), and we frame our laws so that mass murder is commonplace. The New Zealand prime minister said that hers is a peaceful country that fell victim to vicious outsiders, by which she apparently meant Australians. Yet the corpses had barely stiffened before New Zealand gun sales soared. It's as if all those Kiwis looked across the globe at far off America and said to themselves, “We too want to be real men.”
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9 comments:
Isn't it sad that "things" are supposed to define a person? Isn't it sad that people accept that? Perhaps we could all be people who think on their own.
I still think about the children of Sandy Hook. He chose that location because little kids cannot fight back and he just wanted to thrill kill. I think it is significant the New Zealand mass murderer ran like a baby when one guy picks up one of his own empty guns and chases him.
That was a real man.
So was the first guy he shot, whose last words were "Hello Brother" to the guy about to kill him. It takes nothing to pull a trigger, nothing but anger and a dead soul. Seems there is a lot of anger out there and a whole lot of already dead souls.
I'm not sure these killers don't just attach themselves to some "cause" like white supremacy to somehow justify their acts, after the fact. In reality, they're just generic monsters.
Also, its nice to know men who flunk this ridiculous test of manhood. It's nice to know there are real men still out there. With brains and character. Not driven by sudden rages and raging hormones, with guns within reach.
Wow, this is pretty sick. Hope they win the lawsuit, and maybe put Remington out of business. And the advertising company as well.
After posting this, I returned to Bushmaster.com, and was again disconnected upon saying why I was there. No doubt, the people who staff its chat line are instructed to not address such questions because the company is, after all, being sued.
"Perhaps we could all be people who think on their own."
I try to do that, but the fact is that I don't know what factors go into my decision making. I do know that I've become harder and less tolerant than I used to be, but why?
"He chose that location because little kids cannot fight back and he just wanted to thrill kill."
He surely did find the act thrilling, but my guess is that he so hated the people of his town that he wanted to hurt them as much as possible, and what better way than to kill their children. I look at someone like that, and I wonder what might have been done to prevent him from turning out as he did. I know that such people almost always feel alienated, so I can see how, from their point of view, their murders are justified, but I don't know what tips someone so completely over the edge that he is willing to kill strangers who don't even know he exists. I just know that companies like Remington make it ever so easy to murder people by the dozen or, as in the case of the better funded and more resourceful Vegas shooter, by the hundred, and that they do it to make money. Maybe you know that the New Zealand shooter had written the names of other mass murderers on his gun. Just as you and I have our heroes, so does he. He will no doubt spend the rest of his life in prison, and I wonder if he'll look back twenty years from now and say it was worthwhile. Tim McVeigh (the Oklahoma Federal Building bomber) certainly could. I look into such people's eyes, and I wonder why I can't see the evil that is there. Many people whose mugshots that I see on the evening news look dangerous, but this isn't usually true of mass murderers, Dylann Ruth (the Charleston church shooter) being an exception.
"Also, its nice to know men who flunk this ridiculous test of manhood."
Imagine being married to one who passed! No doubt, Remington would say that the test was meant to be funny, but they were relying upon real stereotypes to create it. I HAVE been ridiculed for eating tofu and for being a vegetarian, and only old men are allowed to cry because old men aren't regarded as real men. I also noticed that the assumption underlying the test was that real men are heterosexual.
"Hope they win the lawsuit, and maybe put Remington out of business."
I think of you as pretty conservative, Tom, so I imagined you would stand behind the company's right to freedom of speech. Truthfully, it took me awhile to come to a conclusion about that. Should all advertising that appeals to people's lowest instincts be banned, or just advertising for deadly weapons? I'm less torn by advertising that blatantly lies. For example, the memory aid, Prevagen, has no evidence whatsoever to suggest that it works, yet the company runs ads on TV daily. I can't support such ads as Prevagen's on the basis of free speech because their ads are fraudulent, but Remington's man card ads? Well, to define a real man as someone who would miss a much anticipated sporting event in order to vandalize a car is to encourage criminal behavior, so I'm clear about that, but the manhood campaign could simply be interpreted to mean that the company knows its market and was trying to sell its guns based upon the accuracy of that knowledge. While I don't really believe that all assault rifle owners are macho creatures who suffer from a surfeit of testosterone, I think that enough of them are--or at least wish they were--that Remington was spot-on in trying to reach them. When I was fifteen years old and regarded Clint Eastwood's characters as the penultimate man, the ads would have reached me, and I suppose that a lot of males never get beyond that mentality. Yet for a company to encourage hard-nosed anti-social behavior in order sell what amounts to machine guns is to trespass the boundaries that allows civilized society to exist, and we owe one another more than that. Free speech rights don't exist in a vacuum, and Remington had to have known that it was endangering society with its advertising.
It's Friday night here and it's been a hectic week so I'm not going to contribute anything of real value but let me just say that the more I read of the advertising campaign the more appalled I became.
I was quite disturbed to hear of the escalation of gun sales in NZ after the shooting and tougher restrictions were announced. Now home, I watched the shooting video twice. It is an extraordinarily effective killing machine, where no one stands a chance, close range or at a medium distance. That someone can own a gun as the white power person used is so wrong and should had never been allowed to be in public hands, not here, not in NZ and not in your country. Farmers need guns at times, and at times shoot themselves with them, but otherwise guns of any kind should not be in public hands. Bushmaster sounds like the pits of the lowest.
"That someone can own a gun as the white power person used is so wrong..."
The US has a powerful gun lobby called the National Rifle Association. I mention this because it's not just Bushmaster or a few nutty gun owners who make it sound like gun owners as a whole tend to be criminally insane, it's the NRA itself as you will find if you look up their utterances on Youtube.
Assault rifles are deadly, mostly due to their fire rate, but also because they fire small caliber slugs at a very high velocity, and those slugs are designed to tumble end-over-end when they hit flesh and bone. In the US, those who want to keep our current liberal gun laws are in the minority, but they're one issue voters, they give enormous amounts of money to elect pro-gun politicians (and to defeat candidates who favor gun-control), and thousands of them are most assuredly dangerous people who bitterly resent any governmental control over anything that they want to do. So what is their answer to gun violence? More guns in the hands of more people, their thinking being that if everyone is armed, then no one will dare shoot anyone for fear of being shot. The fact that it doesn't work that way in the ghettos of Chicago or anywhere else in the world doesn't phase them, just as the mass murder of small children, the shooting of hundreds of people at a Las Vegas music festival, or any other amount of evidence suggesting the necessity of gun control doesn't phase them. Nothing whatsoever has the least possibility of phasing gun glorifiers because they're convinced to the core of their being that they're in mortal danger every time they leave home, and the only thing standing between them and death by, what else, another man's gun is their own gun, and screw the rest of us if have a problem with it. Some US states have "open carry" laws, which allow people to walk the streets with guns strapped to their hips like the gunslingers of the Old West. As you can imagine, black people oppose these laws because black people don't dare carry guns openly, and they're scared to be around white people who do because gun-toting white people tend to be the kind of white people who hate minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, people speaking in a foreign language, and anyone who for whatever the reason, just doesn't look right to them. My state of Oregon has "open carry," but my town of Eugene is in a very liberal area in which anyone who is seen on the street carrying a gun is soon surrounded by an enraged citizenry. This is true for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, even cops have accidents with guns, so to think of large numbers of "ordinary" people carrying them is not comforting. For another, most people here believe that anyone who's walking around with a gun on his hip is probably disturbed. Also, what is a guy with a Glock on his hip supposed to do anyway if confronted by a mass murderer with a Bushmaster? Walk around with his own Bushmaster I suppose, but rest assured that just as that politician blamed the deaths of those Muslims on themselves, when there's yet another mass murder here (we have one every few days), the gun crowd will blame the anti-gun people for it.
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