How the AR-15 Became an American Brand
The rifle is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a particularly intractable politics.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/how-the-ar-15-became-an-american-brand
Watching the video last summer, I couldn’t help recalling, given Aldean’s association with a mass shooting, that one thing that was tried in a small town in recent American history was the massacre that killed nineteen children in Uvalde, Texas, last year; that law enforcement in that small town waited in the halls for an hour without confronting the shooter; that the small town’s only pediatrician later testified to Congress about identifying the dead by the cartoons on their clothes because their bodies were too damaged. Considered in this light, “Try That in a Small Town” becomes an allegory about posturing over perceived threats to national integrity while ignoring the lived reality of a horror too disturbing to mediate.