The Gun Industry Can’t Ignore Students Demand Action

The gun industry has spent decades profiting from a killer business, and young people are done paying for it with our lives.

In mid-January, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) hosted its annual trade show and week-long party in Las Vegas—called the SHOT Show—just two miles from where the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history took place.

Like the NRA, the NSSF lobbies for dangerous policies to further their guns-everywhere agenda, like permitless carry. Inside SHOT Show, gun manufacturers showed off new, deadly gun technology and even promoted guns marketed explicitly to children, including the JR-15.

We descended on Las Vegas to confront the gun industry head-on. We are simply asking that gun makers secure their supply chains, market their products responsibly and never to kids and teens, and call out and refuse to work with bad actors in the gun industry.

The gun industry makes more than $9 billion annually, gun violence now kills more than 40,000 Americans per year, wounds twice as many, and costs our country more than $557 billion per year. Young people are experiencing gun violence at an unprecedented rate while the gun industry parties and profits, continuing to make guns deadlier and refusing to take responsibility for the harm they cause.

Students Demand Action leaders said “Enough is enough.” We descended on Las Vegas to confront the gun industry head-on. We are simply asking that gun makers secure their supply chains, market their products responsibly and never to kids and teens, and call out and refuse to work with bad actors in the gun industry.

We wanted to make sure that we couldn’t be ignored, so when we arrived, we scouted locations between the airport and SHOT Show to put up the hundreds of table tents, fliers, and lawn signs with our message: The gun industry has a role to play in ending the gun violence crisis they helped create.

We even designed “Welcome to the Gun Show” stickers and fliers with a QR code that linked directly to our list of demands. We put these “stealth signs” all around the Las Vegas Strip so attendees of SHOT Show saw our message. We put up billboards and worked with Jenny Holzer to have billboard trucks circling the convention.

Along the route to “Range Day,” where SHOT Show attendees shoot their new products (weapons), we put up nearly two thousand yard signs on both sides of the street that said: Guns are the number one killer of kids and teens in America. Our message was unavoidable.

And just in case all of this was unsuccessful in getting the gun industry’s attention, we even projected our message on the conference building to make sure SHOT Show attendees could not ignore us.

For far too long, gun manufacturers have been able to flood our communities with guns and get away with it. Gun makers could choose to market their products responsibly and honestly, secure their supply chains and innovate to make guns safer rather than more deadly. We won’t stand by and let the gun industry avoid responsibility.

Gun companies will not change until the havoc they’ve caused finally hits their bottom line. That’s where we come in. Students Demand Action leaders across the country are demanding their colleges and universities divest from the gun industry. Divestment means getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds, and not taking a cut of the company’s business.

Bring Industry Accountability to Your Campus

If you’re ready to take industry accountability to your campus and demand your school divest from the gun industry, sign up now and we will show you how.

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