Finally! A Scaled Down Assault-type Rifle for the Kiddos
Imagine having your eight year old be the coolest kid in their class when they bring the all-new JR-15, a kids’ version of the AR-15—the style of rifle used in 11 of the 12 most high-profile mass shootings to show and tell.
Now there’s a gun whose “ergonomics are geared towards children”; lighter than an adult version at 2.2 pounds and 20% smaller.
Much of the press on this baby has come from gun safety advocates disgusted with the industry for marketing such a weapon.
Here’s a snip from Fast Company:
“There’s been youth shooting guns for 80 years, but there’s never been a youth AR-15,” says Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive, now senior advisor at Giffords, one of the leading gun violence-prevention groups, cofounded by former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. “I’ve never seen one that’s just an egregiously tactical, offensive weapon of war,” adds Busse, author of Gunfight, a book that discusses the extremist radicalization of the industry.
Keeping with the grand tradition of gaslighting the American public, marketing for this product hails the JR-15 as a step forward in gun safety.
Highlighted are the fact that it ships with a single bullet magazine –bigger magazines are an add-on–, uses 22 long rifle bullets –protecting young shoulders against the scourge of recoil–, and its “advanced safety, which must be pulled out, using a significant amount of force, and rotated into the locked fire position before the rifle can fire.”
The conservative Federalist publication took time out from publishing false information or pseudoscience about COVID-19 and rationalizing away child molestation to gleefully report on the negative reactions of gun safety advocates upon release of the weapon.
…gun control activists don’t care about safety. Instead, supposed gun-safety groups have demonized the launch of the JR-15. The Violence Policy Center has called the product’s launch a “grotesque joke,” and Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign, responded that “[g]uns should never be marketed or catered to children, full stop.”
The manufacturer’s logo for the product (known as WEE1–get it?--wee one) comprises two skulls, depicted as a little boy and girl, sucking on pacifiers, and with a gun sight over one eye.
As the Fast Company article noted:
The branding “keeps the wow factor with the kids”; the logos come on glow-in-the-dark children’s baseball caps, too.
At the Shot Show 2022 trade exhibition, the Illinois-based company gave away hats, shirts, patches and stickers. The annual trade show is sponsored by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is based in Newtown, Connecticut—where a gunman with an AR-15 murdered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
Here are a couple of snippets from the company website:
Our goal was to develop a shooting platform that was not only sized correctly, and safe, but also looks, feels, and operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun.
The BRAND is meant to be EDGY. We believe its(sic) exciting and will build brand recognition and loyalty!
If all this gaslighting posing as marketing sounds familiar, it should. The recently released Violence Policy Center report, entitled "Start Them Young": How the Firearms Industry and Gun Lobby Are Targeting Your Children notes the similarities with another marketing campaign with the same result, i.e., eventual death for killing its consumers and/or their families.
The tragic frequency of shootings involving children and teenagers is well documented and unfortunately now a regular part of our daily existence. Yet few realize that the firearms industry and the organizations that represent their interests, including the National Rifle Association, have made it one of their top marketing priorities to promote the use of guns among America's children, as young as grade-school age. In doing so, the gun industry is following a trail once blazed by the tobacco industry in its efforts to entice children to smoke cigarettes.
As the Federalist puff piece on the weapon noted, the JR-15 is a step in the industry’s evolution towards bringing in a new segment of buyers, while striking fear in the hearts of gun safety advocates:
With the events of the past two years — including historic riots, pandemic restrictions, and a nationwide spike in murders — we have seen record numbers of first-time gun buyers. Many of them are women, racial minorities, and Democrats. Now, we’re seeing a clearer path to help those new gun owners, and others across the country, teach their children gun safety.
The historic collapse of the National Rifle Association doesn’t mean an end to the industry’s fiendish mission of selling more weapons to civilians. With over 393 million guns in civilian hands, (the equivalent of 120 firearms per 100 citizens) the need for creative sales approaches is greater than ever.
The American public is denied the ability to understand the impact of all the guns out there society mean, since the federal agency that should be tasked with compiling that data is hamstrung, thanks to the Tiahrt Amendment which limits what the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms can do with gun-trace related data to anyone other than the police.
So, while establishment politicians are blaming the current spike in murders on a protest slogan (defund the police), it’s entirely possible the cause is something we’re not allowed to see.
As crime data experts Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur concluded in a recent Atlantic magazine article:
Right now, we know that gun sales rose dramatically starting in March 2020, and that murder—driven by gun murders—increased substantially a few months later. We have strong evidence that more people were carrying guns before murder went up in 2020, and the ATF data tell us that newly purchased firearms were used in more crimes than usual. It stands to reason that new guns helped feed 2020’s murder surge, though the data to confirm this conclusion remain agonizingly out of reach. The data aren’t perfect, but they’re strongly suggestive: More guns are behind America’s murder spike.