The NRA’s latest ad campaign is resorting to the use of blatantly sexist, and truly disturbing, videos equating women with assault rifles.
Noir — a weekly program aired by the National Rifle Association as part of its efforts to reach a younger audience — has run two segments that fetishize an assault weapon as an attractive woman.
Over the past year the NRA has launched a number of initiatives to engage with women, minorities, and younger Americans. Noir, a Sunday web series hosted by popular gun blogger turned NRA News commentator Colion Noir, is packaged for a Millennial audience, although the show has been widely mocked by critics as a phony and out-of-touch attempt at messaging.
These blatantly sexist ads feature beautiful women with a voice-over by Noir that appear to describe the women, but in fact are ads for assault rifles.
The first ad, featuring a stylishly-dressed woman filmed in black and white is an ad for a Heckler & Koch MR556 assault rifle and featured the following dialogue:
Why is she alone on this dark street? On this cold night? You care, but she doesn’t. Her Jimmy Choo’s can’t be comfortable, but you’d never know it. Unaffected elegance. Too cool elegance. Not for you elegance, you say. There’s got to be something wrong with her; that attitude, high maintenance, hiding something. She’s taller than you can handle. Flirts more than you can handle too. She’s the kind to tell the bartender how to make her drink. And Chess, yeah it’s a men’s game, but when she plays, men pay. Say you don’t like her, until she looks your way. She’s not easy and she’s not flawless. But she’s never wasted her time thinking about it. She is the HK MR556.
The following ad, for an M4A1 assault rifle, was aired just days after the mass shooting in Isla Vista, California.
As the Violence Policy Center notes on their YouTube page,
“We know the Isla killer was driven by misogyny and dangerous stereotypes of how women are ‘supposed’ to act toward men. yet this is how the NRA responds?”
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