The gun industry is spending millions of dollars a year to market their products to America’s children. Advertising to kids is all part of widening their customer base to combat the waning popularity of shooting sports. The New York Times reports:

The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for “junior shooters” and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of their makers.

Ads encouraging the recreational use of semiautomatic rifles by children are regularly found in the youth magazine Junior Shooters, which is funded by the gun industry. The magazine’s editor once penned an article justifying advertising AR-15’s to children:

“I have heard people say, even shooters that participate in some of the shotgun shooting sports, such things as, ‘Why do you need a semiautomatic gun for hunting?’ ” he wrote. But if the industry is to survive, he said, gun enthusiasts must embrace all youth shooting activities, including ones “using semiautomatic firearms with magazines holding 30-100 rounds.”

…

Semiautomatic firearms are actually not weapons, he said, unless someone chooses to hurt another person with them, and their image has been unfairly tainted by the news media. There is no legitimate reason children should not learn to safely use an AR-15 for recreation, he said.

At the forefront of this campaign are the gun manufacturers and their biggest proponents/lobbyists, the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. And they’re spending big:

The N.R.A. has for decades given grants for youth shooting programs, mostly to Boy Scout councils and 4-H groups, which traditionally involved single-shot rimfire rifles, BB guns and archery. Its $21 million in total grants in 2010 was nearly double what it gave out five years earlier.

Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach “life skills” like responsibility, ethics and citizenship. And the gun industry points to injury statistics that it says show a greater likelihood of getting hurt cheerleading or playing softball than using firearms for fun and sport.

Equating a sprained ankle during cheerleading practice to a gunshot wound is laughable. But it probably works because the gun industry’s “youth marketing initiative”, just like other corporate advertising campaigns, is “backed by extensive social research and is carried out by an array of nonprofit groups financed by the gun industry.” The purpose is, as one study said, “to start them young”, more specifically, at “12 years or younger” because “this is the time that youth are being targeted with competing activities.”

Here’s why this is bad for kids:

…some experts in child psychiatry say that encouraging youthful exposure to guns, even in a structured setting with an emphasis on safety, is asking for trouble. Dr. Jess P. Shatkin, the director of undergraduate studies in child and adolescent mental health at New York University, said that young people are naturally impulsive and that their brains “are engineered to take risks,” making them ill suited for handling guns.

“There are lots of ways to teach responsibility to a kid,” Dr. Shatkin said. “You don’t need a gun to do it.”

As for how to deal with the backlash from people like Dr. Shatkin (who I’m sure will be labeled “whiny liberals”), the gun industry is on top of that:

…several studies suggested methods for smoothing the way for target-shooting programs in schools. One cautioned, “When approaching school systems, it is important to frame the shooting sports only as a mechanism to teach other life skills, rather than an end to itself.”

In another report, the authors warned against using human silhouettes for targets when trying to recruit new shooters and encouraged using words and phrases like “sharing the experience,” “family” and “fun.” They also said children should be enlisted to prod parents to let them join shooting activities: “Such a program could be called ‘Take Me Hunting’ or ‘Take Me Shooting.’ ”

Still, this “guns for kids” campaign faces a major obstacle. Federal law bans  selling firearms to anyone under the age of 18. But don’t worry, they’re working on it, this time at the state level:

The industry recognized that state laws limiting hunting by children could pose a problem, according to a “Youth Hunting Report” prepared by the shooting sports foundation and two other groups. Declaring that “the need for aggressive recruitment is urgent,” the report said a primary objective should be to “eliminate or reduce age minimums.” Still another study recommended allowing children to get a provisional license to hunt with an adult, “perhaps even before requiring them to take hunter safety courses.”

The effort has succeeded in a number of states, including Wisconsin, which in 2009 lowered the minimum hunting age to 10 from 12, and Michigan, where in 2011 the age minimum for hunting small game was eliminated for children accompanied by an adult mentor. The foundation cited statistics suggesting that youth involvement in hunting, as well as target shooting, had picked up in recent years amid the renewed focus on recruitment.

Steve Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told the Times that parents are the ones who should determine whether or not their kids are mature enough to shoot a gun, no the government, saying, “[I]t involves the personal responsibility of the parent and personal responsibility of the child.” This man’s argument totally ignores the fact that putting guns in the hands of kids, or anyone for that matter, isn’t just a risk to the parties involved. Much like a person who operates a vehicle, an armed individual is potentially endangering everyone around her or him.

Let me just point out that a guy in Kansas accidentally shot his wife earlier this month; a Pennsylvania father accidentally shot and killed his 7-year-old kid outside of a gun store in December; and a 7-year-old girl in a skunk costume was shot by a male relative at a halloween party because he mistook her for an actual skunk. If adults can barely practice gun safety, what the fuck makes Sanetti think that kids will fare any better?

How is it that the tobacco industry is prohibited from advertising cigarettes to children but the gun industry is not? It turns out that the gun industry is taking a page out of the big tobacco’s playbook, as Josh Israel at Think Progress explains:

Recognizing that the number of smokers in America was declining — and dying off — cigarette companies sought to addict underage children to ensure a continuing market for their product. A now infamous 1981 Philip Morris corporate memo noted that “[t]oday’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens. In addition, the 10 years following the teenage years is the period during which average daily consumption per smoker increases to the average adult level. The smoking patterns of teenagers are particularly important to Philip Morris.”

Before someone chimes in about how this is necessary to preserve America’s heritage of gun ownership, to prevent tyranny, to save the tradition of hunting or any other excuse the gun industry comes up with: don’t think for one second any of that is true. This is about money, pure and simple. Gun manufacturers are securing their future profitability by endangering America’s children. Anyone willing to defend that has either been exposed to fatal doses of NRA propaganda or is profiting from selling AR-15’s to 12-year-olds.

An advertisement from the online Junior Shooters magazine (New York Times).