When you use colors or visuals in your marketing materials that are almost identical to the same visuals used to market highly violent video games … you’re indicating that you intend to market to our kids.
Rep. Kim Fawcett
Democrat from Fairfield Connecticut
Newtown Activists Call For Change As Gun Trade Show Opens
January 13, 2014
[I don’t know exactly what “marketing materials” she is talking about but from what I can determine the video games use “visuals” that look like real firearms that were sold many years before the video games were created. Not that firearm manufacturers duplicated video game “visuals”.
I have to conclude Rep. Fawcett is either incredibly ignorant or malicious. And since she voted for the repressive gun laws in Connecticut I’m going with malicious. I look forward to this information being used at her trial.—Joe]
Well, it only makes sense – because the guns in real life look like the guns in video games. then gun makers MUST be marketing to kids that play video-game, because looks right? RIGHT?
Face Palm
And yet, “highly violent video games” are also not for kids, so then you have negated that point as well.
This is what happens when someone gets all their information and their wolrd view from popular culture, public schools, universities, TV dramas and movies.
I’m not sure exactly what she’s getting at. I don’t think it’s the easy connection of having guns in games and similar guns in firearms advertising. I suspect it’s that she has a problem with a similar “look and feel” between some firearms and accessories advertising and similar advertising for video games.
You don’t see much firearms advertising on mainstream TV – it’s mostly on the cable channels. But from what I see there, commercials fall basically into three categories: hunting (guys shoots elk, elk falls over), “uber-tactical” (tac-clad ninjas emerge from a swamp, shooting and moving); or self-defense (gripping bedroom or empty parking lot melodrama.). I’m not aware of any self-defense video games, but as for the rest – yeah, I can see similarities, except that the video game ads are far more shoot-em-up than the gun ads.
In print media, there’s a whole family of ads (the company that owns Otis cleaning gear) that have a silly comic book aspect – pretty much over the top Walter Mittyese “operator” meme, with made up names like “Syntrillium” alloy bullets.
Are these things marketing to kids? Heck no. The videos AND gun ads are marketing to adults who haven’t entirely grown up. And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that. How many of us attend firearms tactics classes that are way beyond anything we’re likely to encounter in real life? Shooting is fun. Video games are fun (for some, I’m not a fan.) What’s the big deal?
When you espouse a political philosophy that relies on infantalizing the populace in order to make people more compliant to your tyranny, then you’re marketing to immature adults — and, by extension, children.
Your point is… ?
M
Both is an option, I think plenty of Progressives are maliciously ignorant.
It’s not just guns. That’s simply the current cause du jour.
Remember, some years back, when Camel (the cigarette brand) was taking heat because of the cartoonish Joe Camel ad campaign? (In truth, all the tobacco companies were getting hit for “glamorizing” smoking, but Camel got the worst of it, I think.) In the anti-smoking folks’ minds, “cartoon character” == “marketing to kids,” as if adults are incapable of responding to animated advertisements.
I also seem to recall fast-food restaurants taking similar flack for decorating their interiors with bright primary colors and having cartoony/clownish (you know who I’m talking about) mascots. Presumably, that was exciting/pleasing to kids, therefore kids must be the target audience for unhealthy, gut-rotting “food.”
This tactic is not new. It’s just new to the gun and video game industries. I’m honestly surprised beer and liquor companies haven’t been targeted yet (what kid wouldn’t want to be the “Most Interesting Man in the World”?).
Soooo…does this mean Springfield Armory will be introducing a BFG at SHOT? Wuuuhooooo!
Wow. That’s REALLY scraping the barrel there!!!
It’s a Dem politician. Barrel scraping is what they do.
Even then, though, they don’t remove the magazine and do a chamber-check before the start scraping.
Kim Fawcett has a room-temperature IQ. You can see her ummm-ing her way through poorly-written statements on public access tv in CT, if you are feeling masochistic.
She is a gun-hating liberal and since when have liberals needed facts or logic to make a claim or decide something important?
I feel the need to point out the clearly dim-witted Ms Fawcett that the world in which the rest of us exist happens to come in color. The concept that the world with all of its natural and man made wonders is being marketed to children warms the cockles of my heart. My only distress here is if Ms Fawcett has any offspring, what dreary place it is in which they must reside. Here is to hoping that reality will soon intrude on Ms Fawcett’s delusions.