Little Murders by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

We have become an inhuman and cruel people almost without realizing it. We witness atrocities and killings daily but simply shrug and turn away. We value profit over the sanctity of human life. And worse, we have become indifferent, apathetic—even actively antithetical—to the welfare of our children.

On May 24, 2022, nineteen children and two teachers were killed and seventeen more were wounded at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. On March 27, 2023, three children and three adults were killed at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. These are only the latest in the long list of school shootings in America. The names Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Columbine High School, and Sandy Hook Elementary School still resonate with the horrible sounds and images of massacred children and their inconsolable parents. The common denominators in each of these massacres were angry young men and AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.

On January 7, 2023, at Richneck Elementary School, a six-year-old boy shot his first-grade teacher in her classroom with a pistol owned by his mother. On December 22, 2022, a ten-year-old boy shot and killed his mother because she refused to buy him a virtual reality headset. On June 20, 2023, in Norwalk, Ohio, a two-year-old accidentally shot and killed his mother.

According to a report by the NY Times, guns became the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the U.S. in 2020, surpassing automobile accidents and disease. Things have only gotten worse since then. The Gun Violence Archive reported that 1,676 children died in gun-related deaths, up from 1,573 deaths recorded a year earlier. According to CDC statistics, total firearm deaths reached 45,222 in 2022, an increase of 13.5% over the previous year. During the COVID epidemic, drug companies scrambled to find a vaccine and did, saving the lives of tens of thousands—or more—of citizens. Yet, as a people, we have turned our back on this epidemic of firearm deaths—particularly the deaths of our children. Elementary schools now have active shooter drills and some state legislatures have passed laws allowing teachers to carry guns in schools.

Into this maelstrom of horror, insanity, and apathy comes a dose of the surreal, reminiscent of the 1976 Saturday Night Live “Consumer Probe” skit. In this comic bit, Dan Aykroyd played Irwin Mainway, a fast-talking less than scrupulous toy manufacturer whose products for children included “Bag O’Glass”, “Bag O’Vipers”, and “Bag O’Nails”, obviously low-cost products—or junk—marketed as toys. Candice Bergen, playing the consumer advocate, questions whether these products are safe for children. Mainway assures that not only are they safe, but they are, in fact, educational.

Fast forward almost fifty years into the future. Eric Schmid, owner of WEE1, is marketing the JR-15, a scaled-down lightweight model of the AR-15, the semi-automatic weapon of choice for young mass shooters everywhere. The original launch of the product was accompanied by a logo of a skull with a mohawk and eyepatch sucking a pacifier (for little boys), and a skull with blonde pigtails and an eyepatch also with a binky in its mouth (for girls). The JR-15 is a 22-caliber long rifle designed to be a miniaturized version of its larger lethal cousin.

Eric Schmid, the owner of WEE1, has since pulled the controversial logos but is still marketing these rifles as “educational” tools. After Schmid unveiled the product at the 2022 SHOT gun show in Las Vegas, causing some lawmakers attempted to enact legislation restricting marketing of firearms to children. According to the Vice website, California was successful in enacting “a fairly sweeping law banning the advertising of firearms to children.” Of course, pro-gun elements in Congress disagreed. Representative Marjory Taylor-Green even said that had the children in Uvalde had JR-15s, they might have been able to defend themselves. That absurd statement is eerily reminiscent of Aykroyd’s Irwin Mainway and is just as unthinking and just as mercenary.

The NRA is all for Schmid’s product and his message. In their ongoing and never-ending efforts to arm every man, woman, child, and pet in America (ideally two or three times), they—in the name of gun safety—are actively recruiting children.

Of course, marketing to young people is nothing new to the gun industry. According to NPR, manufacturers of the AR-15 have focused their marketing on young men, airing ads that mimicked first-person shooter video games, extolled the weapon’s military pedigree, and claimed that owning the weapon will put buyers “at the top of the testosterone food chain” (NPR).

These tactics playing on the insecurities and fears of young men have resulted in one billion dollars in revenue for these gun manufacturers over the past ten years. And now these gunmakers are targeting children and toddlers. Will they use the first grader who shot his teacher as a spokesperson? Or create a first-person shooter game in which the protagonist has to break into an elementary school and kill as many people as possible—maybe getting triple points for every kill under eight years of age? How many points for taking out the principal or the gym teacher?

Will manufacturers create a new AR-15 in the shape of an erect penis to attract new buyers eager to compensate for their perceived—and real—shortcomings? Will the NRA start offering anger management classes using target dummies with the likenesses of old girlfriends or nemeses taped to their heads? Or will these classes teach young men to express their anger in meaningful ways like firing two guns simultaneously—being on top of the testosterone food chain?

These marketing strategies are no more absurd than WEE1’s cynical retailing of guns to babies. Pacifiers and pigtails to sell junior weapons of mass destruction. Irwin Mainway would be proud.

Eric Schmid’s total disregard and tone-deaf reaction to the hundreds of mass shootings of schoolchildren in their classrooms is so clueless, it’s almost funny—except when you think of the little mangled bodies at Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary, children so badly shot up they could only be identified by their DNA. It’s not hard to draw a straight line from ruthless and despicable arms dealers like Schmid—even when they clothed in messages of teaching responsible gun use and safety—to the blood-spattered classrooms he and his ilk are responsible for.

If the pro-lifers truly want to save children, stand up to the NRA. If hunters and responsible outdoorsman want to save children, stand up to the NRA. If our senators and representatives give a damn about their constituents and their children, stand up to the NRA. We need to stop the non-stop pernicious marketing of deadly weapons to susceptible buyers—most of them not much more than children themselves. Make assault weapons illegal again. As we did with cigarettes, make the advertising of firearms not only undesirable but illegal.

Giving a loaded gun to a child is every bit as disgraceful and evil as it sounds. I doubt if even Irwin Mainway would do it.