04 Oct In-the-News Update [Issue: 2nd Amendment]
Recently, a cohort of 12 Senators submitted a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting an investigation and higher levels of scrutiny for advertisements produced by firearm manufacturers. Led by Ed Markey (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Chris Murphey (D-CT) the dozen senators claim that gun manufacturers deliberately market their weapons to kids and youth using advertising practices that falsely promote the “myth of self-defense.” They even try to connect these advertisements to increased violence, claiming that the advertisement practices have a direct causal relationship with youth-involved violence and mass shootings. Their letter rejects data-supported evidence of citizens effectively using firearms for their own self-defense and further claim that manufacturers are misleading their customers by not informing them of the “substantial and unavoidable risks that come with firearm ownership, possession, and use…” Of course, all of this ignores the fact that even the CDC found that “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”