Parents of some of the children massacred in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting are stepping up their anti-gun violence campaign by exposing how the firearms industry is marketing weapons of war specifically to vulnerable adolescents.
In a fresh stage in its battle to staunch the rising loss of life from mass shootings, Sandy Hook Promise, a group formed by some of the victims’ families, is pressuring gun manufacturers to stop what it says is a cynical and aggressive effort to sell military-style weapons to young and impressionable Americans. The group is alarmed by a shift in tone in gun advertising in which, it says, major companies have consciously decided to boost profits by targeting kids as young as 10.
“They are telling lonely and isolated children, ‘This is what you need to be a man, this is what’s going to make you powerful, this is how you avenge yourself on those who bullied you – you need an AR-15,’” said Nicole Hockley, CEO of the Sandy Hook Promise foundation.
Hockley’s youngest son, Dylan, was six when he was murdered in the December 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. He was one of 20 six- and seven-year-olds gunned down, along with six adult staff.
The new Sandy Hook Promise pressure campaign, dubbed Untargeting Kids, comes at a critical time in the US with mass shootings and gun deaths among those under 19 increasing at startling rates. Between 2019 and 2021, firearm deaths among US children and teens rose by 50%, making them the leading cause of death for these age groups above even car accidents.
This year has also seen a record high of 327 school shootings, according to the National Center for Education Statistics – double the year before. Overall, mass shootings are becoming both more frequent and more deadly, according to the Violence Prevention Project.
A growing number of those tragedies are perpetrated by young males aged 21 and under.
At the same time, sales of the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle have soared, making the weapon the bestselling rifle in the US, with about one in 20 US adults owning at least one, according to the Washington Post.
The new campaign follows the successful lawsuit brought by nine Sandy Hook victims’ families against Remington, maker of the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle that was used by the Newtown shooter. The suit forced Remington and its insurers to settle for $73m, tipping the company into bankruptcy.
Critically, Remington was also obliged to hand over thousands of documents revealing its inner workings and strategy. The trove revealed that in 2011, a year before Dylan and the other Sandy Hook victims were killed, the Cerberus Capital venture company that had bought Remington and other gun companies came up with a new ambition – to create “America’s foremost firearms empire”.
A memo titled 2011 Planning Creative Brief that was discovered among the disclosed documents laid out the plan. It specified the demographic groups that were to be targeted, including “Millennials” and “Youth”.
At the time the memo was written, millennials were aged between 10 and 14.
“These were kids who were not legally old enough to buy a firearm, but they were preparing the market ahead – and that’s really disturbing,” Hockley said. “In the last 10 years, it’s gotten significantly worse, with firearms specifically designed for child-sized hands and much more aggressive marketing on social media.”
An example of the trend is the social media message that was posted on 24 May 2022 by Daniel Defense, one of the largest privately owned firearms manufacturers. It consisted of a photo of a young boy, perhaps aged six, with a large assault rifle across his lap and an extended clip on the floor beside him.
An adult’s finger is pointing down at him, with the caption: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
On the same day that message was posted, an 18-year-old shooter armed with an M4-style carbine produced by Daniel Defense entered the Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers.
Another advert highlighted by Sandy Hook Promise depicts a teenaged girl carrying four large assault rifles in her arms.
“Girls don’t want flowers for Valentine’s Day. We want GUNS,” it says.
In recent years, a new range of guns designed specifically for children has been developed. The Chicago-based company Wee 1 Tactical released in 2022 what it called the JR-15, an assault-style rifle with a “small size, lightweight rugged polymer construction and ergonomics geared towards smaller enthusiasts”.
The marketing of the weapon, which is identical to an AR-15 only on a smaller scale, suggested it was conceived to be “a young person’s first shooting experience”.
“Looks, feels, and operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun,” the advert said, alongside cartoons of a boy and a girl with skull faces. After protests, the skulls were removed.
There is growing scientific understanding of how the development of the human brain makes children and teenagers especially susceptible to marketing that takes advantage of their desire for social acceptance. Apurva Bhatt, a psychiatrist in San Francisco working with children and adolescents, said that the front region of the brain, which is involved in impulse control and regulation of emotions, matures last.
“The young, developing brain has a heightened need for social connection and acceptance,” Bhatt said. “The allure of guns, which are often portrayed as symbols of power and control and offer a sense of belonging in modern gun marketing, can be especially tempting to these individuals who feel powerless or disconnected in daily life.”
The reach of media materials tailored to kids can be substantial. Junior Shooters magazine, which has been banned in California and Illinois, has a circulation of 120,000.
Young social media influencers, known as “kidfluencers”, are also used as peer-to-peer marketing to children. Autumns Armory, which promotes guns and accessories through videos featuring a nine-year-old girl, has 240,000 subscribers.
“Tactical Mia”, aged eight, has 11,000 followers on Instagram.
Some of the most potent marketing materials to kids carries strong sexual undercurrents. They portray guns as an epitome of masculinity in ways that can be particularly harmful to adolescent boys who are experiencing trauma or loneliness.
The tactic has spawned its own gun industry marketing buzzword: “gun bunnies”. Glamorous-looking young women post photographs of themselves on social media posing with assault rifles.
“To prey on someone’s feelings of worthlessness or lack of desirability, and to say ‘This is the gun you need to be attractive’, that’s just disgusting, plain and simple,” Hockley said.
The aim of the Sandy Hook Promise campaign in the first instance, she said, was to shame gun manufacturers into voluntarily changing their ways: “I’m hopeful that bringing this into the light will pressure the firearms industry to stop marketing specifically to kids.”
Should the gun companies fail to respond through self-regulation, then the parents of Sandy Hook Promise intend to go to the next level: demanding congressional action.
“There’s a lot of energy around this right now,” Hockley said. “We are talking about protecting kids against their No 1 killer – firearms – so I do believe there will be enough public demand for Congress to get it done.”
• This article was amended on 4 January 2024 because it was nine Sandy Hook families who won the lawsuit against Remington, not Sandy Hook Promise as an earlier version said.
