Gun industry frames escalating weapon lethality as ordinary market competition

Evidence

An executive of a trade group representing gun manufacturers trivialized the deadly escalation of firepower as a standard competitive business practice: “Just like the fashion industry, the firearms industry likes to encourage new products to get people to buy its products” (Butterfield, 1999). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1124

The gun industry attributes the blame for the escalating lethality of its firearms to public demand. Recall Olberg’s explanation of why Smith & Wesson was selling small lethal pistols that are easy to conceal: “I sell the guns that the market is demanding” (Albright, Alexander, Arvidson, & Eason, 1981). As we have seen, innovative lethality was driven by sagging gun sales and the battle among gun makers for the small-gun market, not by consumer demand. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1131

Categorization

• XREF: A pure instance of what Bandura elsewhere calls the moral disengagement of advantage — reclassifying lethal products as everyday consumer goods, comparable to tobacco or sugar-industry framing.
• DEEPTHINKING: The leap of construing mass-murder tools through the fashion-cycle lens is a compact, nearly perfect demonstration of how moral disengagement redefines the very category of an object.
• QUESTION: Is ‘serving demand’ a defensible morally-licensed excuse across industries, or distinct to weapons manufacturers — worth testing against the existing claims.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1124; Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1131