Man Card is a high school-level ad campaign for Bushmaster, pretty much on a par with a Super Bowl beer campaign.
This is an advertisement for one of the weapons used in the Newtown massacre:
Please share widely!
Niche Marketing to Sociopaths
If nothing else, we can make life miserable for their call center for awhile.
From their contact page, the number for “Dealers and Wholesalers” to call is 1-800-998-7928. Wait till the end or press “0” to get an operator, tell the operator what you think.
I’d love to get a line on media outlets that carry their advertising — while we pursue various political solutions, I think it’s time to make life harder for everybody associated with these guys, from the CEO all the way down to the mail clerk.
Here are some other folks worth embarrassing:
– Steve Feinberg: Wealthy financier, “active in the field of private equity”, founder and head of Cerberus Capital Management, the company that in 2006 bought out the company that produces Bushmaster.
– George Kollitides II: Interim CEO of “Freedom Group, Inc.”, the entity assembled by Cerberus that owns and manages Bushmaster, as well as Remington and “DPMS Panther Arms”.
– Robert Nardelli, CEO of Freedom Group, Inc. until March of 2012.
There was much talk during the recent campaign about private equity funds and their role in creating and perpetuating the collapse of our consumer economy. Some of us were chastised for asserting the fundamental immorality of the ruthless economic exploitation and plundering that is the stock-in-trade of companies like this.
This is today’s corporate America. These are the people who brought you the thankfully-failed Mitt Romney campaign. These are the people who fund the right wing and the GOP.
These are the child-killers.
They’re pulling out already.
just like cigarettes. There’s no need to advertise human-killing machines in magazines, commercials, bulletins or anything of the sort.
It’s high time society acknowledged that killing machines like these are at least as dangerous as booze and cigarettes, and acted accordingly.
fired every experienced helpful employee at Home Depot?
Who then went to become CEO of Chrysler, which needed a bailout?
That Bob Nardelli?
Go figure.
Look at the unbelievable details of this ad campaign.
It encouraged consumers to target someone by having their “man card” revoked, for reasons that included being a “coward” afraid of “tough-looking 5th graders.”
Bushmaster published one such “revocation” for a consumer named “Adam L.”
So it is inarguable that Bushmaster and its far-right corporate parents not only make high-volume semiautomatic rifles, they urge young men to think of them as tools for achieving manhood by dominating others.
And there is a possibility that Lanza’s mother, a paranoid survivalist, was trying to help her son grow out of his problems by challenging his masculinity in this sick way.
Manhood so easily lost isn’t worth “getting back”.
While we recoil in disgust at this obscene campaign, we should not lose sight of the high-profile right-wing men (no women, that I’ve found so far) who — according to media reports — grace the ranks of Cerberus (emphasis mine):
This is the ilk that fell over themselves to acquire Bushmaster in the aftermath of the similarly nauseating 2002 sniper murders in the Washington DC area. These miscreants encourage and pander to nutcases like Nancy Lanza through advertising campaigns like this, ENORMOUS grants given to extremist right-wing organizations and web-sites, and through the outright ownership and control of right-wing media organizations like Fox News.
Not surprisingly, they also own the GOP.
bleeps. Sad.