Reddit reviews Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America

There was a shift in the marketing practices of gun manufacturers that took place in and around the 1990s. The author Tom Diaz talks about it in his book, "Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America."

Basically, gun manufacturers collectively realized that the problem with selling guns for presumably economic or utilitarian purposes -- such as for hunting wild game or killing agricultural pests and varmints -- was that a person would buy a gun or two probably in early adulthood and then maybe never buy another gun for the rest of his or her life, since guns, generally speaking, are such durable goods.

Thus, they came up with new marketing techniques and ad campaigns that focused on the need for guns for personal defense against crazed, hyper-aggressive attackers, or that subtly (or not so subtly) linked gun ownership to abstract ideas about masculinity and politics. The manufacturers found that they could sell more guns this way, even if to fewer people overall, and it's the advertising ploy that nearly all of the gun manufacturers have switched to in order to adapt to the reality that fewer and fewer Americans actually have any real use for guns.