Gun industry spokesmen use euphemism and comparison to deny rifle lethality

Evidence

These lethal firearms, in Froman’s view, are no more than a technologically advanced way of protecting free speech. Lawrence Keane, a spokesman for the gun industry’s trade association, tried to cloak the lethality of the semiautomatic assault rifle in benign recreational terms as a “modern sporting rifle” (Shear & Davis, 2015). These rifles are military-style assault weapons, not sport-hunting rifles. 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

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the vault’s existing claims about how interested parties dress harmful policy in benign language — parallels Cooper’s social-conservatism argument on framing.
• ADDENDUM: Fits the ‘moral panic’/signaling frame from the immodesty article: rhetoric that reframes contested objects to serve a group’s political identity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1124