The Gun Industry’s Nine Most Outrageous Marketing Ploys

After more than a decade of the U.S. being at war, any connection to the armed forces has become a powerful marketing tool for gunmakers like Sig Sauer.

The gun lobby insists that AR-15s and similar semiautomatics are not "assault weapons" – they're "modern sporting rifles." But gunmakers themselves hype the military-grade firepower of their products. Bushmaster, the maker of the rifle used by Newtown killer Adam Lanza, peddles an "Adaptive Combat Rifle" on the civilian market.

Gunmaker Barrett specializes in selling military-grade, anti-personnel and anti-materiel sniper rifles to couch potatoes who like to imagine themselves as members of the Special Forces. The tagline says it all.

Female gun ownership is a third of men's. To attract lady shooters, the industry's marketing geniuses are now aggressively pushing pink firearms (see these examples from Sig Sauer and Smith and Wesson). This $140 stock set sold at GunGoddess.com can even make an AR-15 look cute.

The industry has long sold guns to women through fear, with messages that suggest that only a gun in the house will stop an intruder or sexual predator in time. What’s new is that the industry's determination to sell battlefield weapons to women. The Five-seveN pistol was designed to fire rounds capable of piercing body armor in combat. It's now sold as a "Ladies' Home Companion."

The big names in the industry – Ruger, Glock, Bushmaster, you name it– sponsor a magazine called Junior Shooters, which sells children as young as eight on the joys of assault weaponry.

Little girls as young as six are also in gunmakers' sights. The industry has even dreamed up "National Take Your Daughter to the Range Day," where little ones can learn to shoot AR-15s "like a girl." Check out the event's creepy logo.

To appeal to millennials, the industry has taken a cue from Hollywood and the video game industry, turning shooting ranges into "Zombies" hunts. Zombie Industries markets 3-D dummies of the undead that either "bleed" zombie goo when you shoot them or "burst into little pieces of blood soaked, Zombie matter." This model is disturbingly called "The Ex."

Top ammo makers like Hornady have even gotten into the gamification of guns, marketing a line of bullets called Zombie Max– which they promote with a Hollywood-style promo of a young man firing on human actors at close range with his military-inspired guns. Note the warning on the ammo box.