From the Magazine: The heavily armed millennials of Instagram
Late summer in Texas. A shirtless Mat Best takes a photo of himself gazing out from behind a desert-colored AR-15. He holds the rifle vertically so that it obscures, in a stylized way, half his tattooed chest and ruggedly handsome features. If Abercrombie & Fitch did a photo shoot in Fallujah, it would produce something like this.
Mat Best is the de facto leader of the movement. A 32-year-old ex-Army Ranger, he’s also the co-founder and public face of Black Rifle Coffee Company, which does gangbusters business selling artisan joe to Second Amendment die-hards. In his brand-ambassadorial capacity, he posts photos and videos of himself, often performing skits, to market an aspirational lifestyle that revolves around firearms, red meat and his hot wife, Noelle.
Instead, he molded the brands in his playful image. In his hands, a gun was as much a weapon as a man-cave accessory. For example, Best claims to have popularized the nonsense word “pewpew,” turning it into a dominant meme on gun-world social media. “Just kind of a funny noise for shooting a gun. Pewpew!” Now those two syllables are all over the Internet of guns, plastered in hashtag form on T-shirts and beer cozies and other ephemera.
And as with any other lifestyle that finds its primary expression on social media, the Tactical Life has been commodified. Mat Best uses his brand equity to sell coffee products. Other influencers earn money by brandishing tactical paraphernalia in their posts. It’s probably pointless to try to distinguish the artificial from the organic qualities of the movement, since the most “authentic” voices tend to be the most marketable.
To the untrained eye, Bennett might seem like a uniquely narcissistic Internet head case. In fact, there are thousands of people in the tactical world who post stuff like this on Instagram every day. Predictably, the most popular content is: women with guns, wearing not much clothing. For example, @buff_cookie is a blonde named Casey Cook with 284,000-plus followers. She’s as apt to appear with her toddler-age daughter as she is spread-eagled at a range, shooting a machine gun.
Among them, the most popular need to be just relatable enough to attract an aspirational following. After Mat Best, one of the most prominent influencers is 35-year-old Vaughn NeVille, a bearded dad who lives in Utah and calls himself The ManSpot. A few years ago, NeVille was a door-to-door home-alarm salesman in the Southeast. On the side, he was cultivating an Instagram presence centered on guns and the great outdoors.
I’m here to meet Amy Robbins before she takes me target-shooting at the Frisco Gun Club. Robbins grew up in the nearby suburbs and, in her 20s, modeled and worked in talent management. At one point, she was named one of D Magazine’s “10 Most Beautiful” women in Dallas. She ended up co-hosting an NRATV show with tactical star Colion Noir, a young, black personality on the TV network. From there, she leveraged her online persona to create a company called Alexo Athletica.
Alexo hit an ideological sweet spot. Robbins could claim the mantle of feminist empowerment without alienating conservatives. “We literally launched right at the height of the #MeToo movement. It’s like, thank you. We knew these statistics, we know this stuff has been happening,” she says. “To me, gun rights are women’s rights. What better way to say, ‘Yes, we are equals,’ than to actually put yourself on an equal playing field with a man who might be a threat in your life.
What explains the surge? A company like Alexo offers a clue. While Robbins has positioned her clothing as an elegant antidote to the bunnies and operators that dominate the space, she has in fact gotten closer than anyone to the heart of the tactical mission: to make gun ownership seem both sexy and urgent. To make it seem like it just might save your life.
It took longer for manufacturers to successfully market military-style rifles to the public. For one, weapons like the AR-15 were designed for use in the Vietnam War, a branding liability into the 1980s. Two, they seemed pointless. For hunting, they were too powerful to be sporting. For self-defense, completely unwieldy. They also didn’t fit the prevailing masculine archetype of gun ownership. ARs were cheap, lightweight and customizable, making their surreal potency seem ill-gotten.
Sales were bolstered by advertising campaigns from gun companies and lobbying groups that exploited consumer fear: of terrorists, of undocumented immigrants, of government regulation. Kirgin himself, a former police officer in Ferguson, Mo., started his retail business out of the back of a storefront in the days after the 2014 protests and riots that inflamed the city in response to an officer’s shooting of an unarmed black man. In 1999, Pew Research Center asked gun owners why they carried.
The last piece to this puzzle involves some choice rebranding. In 2008, Phillip Peterson wrote a book called the “Gun Digest Buyer’s Guide to Assault Weapons.” Two years later, Gun Digest released a new edition of the same book, with a different name: “Gun Digest Buyer’s Guide to Tactical Rifles.” That’s not by accident. The word “assault” won’t help you sell diaper bags.
Basically, Krieger thinks most of the criticism tactical folks get is the result of a category error. “I always get that one question, ‘Why does anyone need an AR?’ I say, ‘Because they’re fun.’ ” In other words, nobody needs them. They just want them. They’re a hobby. Problem is, he says, people don’t see that. “A lot of the time, you’ll see this in politics: ‘We’re not here to take your hunting rifles away. We just want to stop these scary black guns.
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