Recoil Magazine cover is why the gun industry sucks so much right now
Recoil Magazine has finally done it, they found an actual factual porn star gun bunny.
But she’s not the problem, she’s the symptom.
The whole gun industry just sucks.
It’s not that different from the car industry, to be honest.
Both have succumbed to two powerful and evil forces: risk-averse marketing and efficiency.
Look at that cover. What do you see?
Plastic fantastic (both the pistols and the boobs) and ARs.
That’s it. That’s the gun industry right now.
Go to a gun store and tell me what you see.
ARs of every conceivable make, with little more than subtle differences in machining aesthetics.
Striker fired polymer pistols in 9mm, with little more than subtle variations in grip texture and color.
9mm carbines that are a combination of the above two groups.
A few 1911s.
A few bolt-action rifles that haven’t changed much in the last 60 years.
Somebody’s reproduction of a popular Cold War-era stamped sheet metal gun.
Glocks are popular so everyone makes their version of it.
ARs are popular so everyone makes their version of it.
That’s the industry. Designing something new and innovative is difficult and it comes with the risk that it won’t sell. Economics of scale and design for manufacturability on CNCs means that mass manufacture of common components is cheap.
So the entire gun industry has fallen towards the event horizon of mass manufacturing the same few most popular and common designs. Anything that strays from that is obscenely expensive. Of course, being obscenely expensive, they don’t sell as many so marketing is disinclined to try new, novel, and different again, further reinforcing the drive to the black hole of all guns being Glocks and ARs in different colors and a few different calibers.
Just watch Forgotten Weapons and see how the industry was before this attitude took over. Look at the diversity of designs.
I said it is like the car industry. We have a nostalgia for a time when cars were designed with flair. Fins, fairings, and flash.
Now, marketing and production efficiency, combined with fuel efficiency standards and fluid dynamics software, means that every new car on the road looks just like every other new car, all going towards the nexus of optimizing aerodynamics against interior space, which produces roughly the same shape every time.
No wonder pickups are so popular, at least you can tell a Ram from a Ford from a Chevy. Every crossover is indistinguishable from the next.
Panic buying of ARs and high capacity 9mms didn’t help matters either. That further reinforced the idea that all the consumer base wants is plastic wonder 9s and ARs.
So what is the gun industry left to do to draw your attention?
Tits and ass.
You can have this black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm or that black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm or maybe this other black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm and for $100 more there is this special edition black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm but done in Flat Dark Earth.
Are you bored by your choices?
Are exaggerated lighting cuts in that black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm like your pistol had a run-in with a drunk machinist with an end mill not doing it for you?
Well here is an Instagram model with perky tits and a fantastic ass in tactical yoga pants and a skin-tight shooting shirt holding that black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm.
The sad thing is that I know people in the industry who want to make new, novel, and interesting. I know people in the industry who are passionate firearms enthusiasts and want to build cool things that are different.
Market forces are like a riptide, they are almost impossible to fight against, and sadly I’ve watched some good people get washed out of the industry because of them.
It’s sad but the result is that the industry is selling more guns than ever before, but with less variety in designs since the dawning of the self-contained metallic cartridge.
The fewer the guns that are interesting, the more they distract you with tits.
I truly, honestly, sincerely, hope that if the panic buying market ever slows down, that at least some of the industry will use those record profits to take some risks and come up with something cool and different.
