ABSTRACT
A 2003 article in the National Rifle Association’s Woman’s Outlook, tellingly titled ‘The Gateway Gun,’ plays on mothers’ anxieties about their children’s development and achievements and suggests gun ownership as a way of insuring a well-adjusted and successful child. It is easy to become numb to the seemingly endless series of child deaths involving firearms – or, rather, deaths resulting from the interaction of children and guns. In 2013 it was a five-year-old boy in Texas who shot himself to death with his babysitter’s gun while she was napping. Nearly 1,300 children die each year in the United States as the result of firearms, making gun deaths more common for kids than deaths from asthma or flu. Wing was not alone in noticing the phenomenon of the gun industry targeting young consumers. In 2013, Slate published a piece titled ‘The Gun Industry Wants to Sell Your Kid an AR-15’.
