Valentine’s Day is a holiday meant for celebrating love and romance. But the gun industry often uses it as an opportunity to market firearms and ammunition to their followers with social media posts — like the examples shown below — that ignore the serious risks of owning a gun and conflate love and intimacy with objects primarily designed to kill.
The statistics surrounding firearms and intimate partners, particularly women, are grim. More than 70 percent of intimate-partner homicides in the United States are committed with firearms, and an average of 76 women are shot and killed each month by an intimate partner. Access to a gun also makes it five times more likely that an abusive partner will kill his female victim.
This Valentine’s Day also marked seven years since a 19-year-old armed with a Smith & Wesson AR-15 shot and killed 17 people and wounded another 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018. But that did not stop gun makers from using the day to market AR-15s and other military-grade weapons.
love for military-grade weapons
Anderson Manufacturing, a Kentucky-based AR-15 manufacturer, posted an image of an AR-15 lower receiver engraved with a heart and “Lube Me,” a crass joke about the lubrication required to keep such a rifle “running smoothly.” Anderson said that its production team would not produce the receiver because it “has boundaries,” but the same cannot be said for the company’s marketing department.
Firearms Depot, an online firearm and ammunition retailer, posted several Valentine’s Day cards on Instagram — urging followers to send them to Valentines “or else.”
Barrett Firearms, which produces .50-caliber sniper rifles for military and civilian customers that are powerful enough to down helicopters, disable vehicle engines, and penetrate armor at great distances, posted a photo on Instagram of a woman proposing to a man with one of the company’s Model 82A1 rifles. “She went to Barrett” is a play on the slogan used by Jared Jewelers.
more cringe-worthy posts
Several gun companies tried to market their products with “roses are red”-style poems. For example, in an Instagram post, Kel-Tec wrote, “Roses are red, violets are blue, staring at what I love means firepower too!” to caption a photo of a woman grinning while holding a SUB2000 folding rifle equipped with an extended magazine and a built-in silencer.
A note about that “firepower”: Police recovered a SUB2000 from the Highland Park shooter’s vehicle in July 2022, and the perpetrator of the Covenant High School mass shooting in March 2023 used a SUB2000 along with two other firearms.
Colt posted a photo of a Python revolver with the caption “Roses are red, Pythons are blued” — a reference to the revolver’s finish — “wheel guns make our hearts go #pewpew.”
Gun maker Diamondback Firearms did not bother completing the poem, instead asking “freedom-lovers” to supply their own Second-Amendment-related endings.
Even Gun Owners of America, a far-right gun group that opposes all gun safety measures — even background checks that help prevent convicted felons and domestic abusers from obtaining firearms, among others — got in on the act. The group’s message: “Our love language is no compromise.”
More examples from this year and previous Valentine’s Days are below. To learn more about the gun industry’s toxic marketing tactics, click here.
