Big Surprise, The Trace Doesn't Like "Gun Inflluencers"

If you want to know what the opposition is thinking, you need to subscribe to their email lists.  Today's edition of The Trace has a piece on so-called "gun influencers" - folks who post about their hunting and or shooting activities on social media like Instagram and Facebook.  Today's piece focuses on Kendall Jones as an example of how the firearms industry turns to these folks to reach a young audiance.

In 2014, Kendall Jones went viral. The then-19-year-old Texas Tech cheerleader became perhaps the “most eminently hateable person on the Internet,” as The Washington Post put it, for posing with the dead bodies of zebras, rhinos, elephants, and lions, among other big-game animals, for pictures posted to her public Facebook page. The collective antipathy toward Jones made her a minor celebrity — and gave her the notoriety that helped kick off her social media influencing career.

Jones, whose Instagram account has nearly 260,000 followers, has influencing and brand ambassador agreements with companies from the hunting and weapons industries, Media Matters reported in August, including Guns.com. She’s part of a sprawling network of influencers that have built large audiences specifically interested in firearms and gun culture — and, The Trace’s Champe Barton reported this week, helped the gun industry reach younger, more impressionable audiences while dodging social media platform policies that ban firearm sales and marketing on their platforms.

Gun influencers like Jones and others live in a gray area. Although some appear to periodically disregard Federal Trade Commission rules about paid marketing disclosures, they’re technically not doing anything wrong by running subtle campaign ads. Their work keeping the gun industry top-of-mind, though, can show up in more than just dollars.

To the gun ban lobby, we shouldn't see young people with firearms much less posting about using them.  They rail against "angry old white men" gun owners but at the same time, they don't want us to see anything that changes that narrative.  Since the pandemic there have been articles written that face of gun owners is changing.

The Trace is fixsated on a connection between gun owners and "white-supremecists" and doesn't miss the chance to bring that in to this article as well.  

Gun influencers like Jones and others live in a gray area. Although some appear to periodically disregard Federal Trade Commission rules about paid marketing disclosures, they’re technically not doing anything wrong by running subtle campaign ads. Their work keeping the gun industry top-of-mind, though, can show up in more than just dollars.

Take Garand Thumb, a verified YouTube account with more than 3 million subscribers. Garand Thumb was named in a New York Attorney General report on the racist mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo last year. The office found that the shooter’s “knowledge of weapons and related equipment” came, in part, from “instructional YouTube videos like those of Garand Thumb.” The account was named elsewhere, too: The Buffalo shooter mentioned Garand Thumb in the manifesto he wrote before the massacre.

To the gun ban lobby, if a racist mentions something from social media, it must mean that those who post about firearms on social media feed racist tendencies.  The Trace is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the gun ban lobby and today's piece severs only to advance a narrative they hope will be picked up by legitimate media outlets.