So I saw this on Twitchy.
Matt Yglesias is a Senior Correspondent and Co-Founder at Vox, and is one of the most ignorant and uninformed people to ever call themselves a member of the media.
He Tweeted a short thread about brewers and the beer industry, that is among the wrongest things ever to ever be put on the internet.
How many times have we seen this exact thing said about gun companies and the NRA, i.e., those gun companies and the NRA deliberately market to and sell to criminals for the purposes for stoking fear and driving up gun sales to ordinary citizens.
There was pushback on Twitter by people in the beer industry.
This is exactly the same for the gun industry.
There is some focus on the new shooter who has never bought a gun before, but that is a smaller market.
The focus is on the casual gun owner expanding their collection and parents buying guns to teach the next generation to shoot.
You make your bread and butter selling the deer rifle, then the long range rifle, the waterfowl gun, and the turkey gun, and the 22 to shoot with the kids all to the same three-season hunter/sportsman/target shooter.
There is little money to be made and lots of liability to be had in arming criminals to drive sales through fear.
This is the zenith of anti-profit and anti-corporation conspiracy theorizing, where every CEO is a mustache-twirling villain.
At least it is refreshing to know that Matt Yglesias and his ilk don’t just hate us in the gun world personally, they hate all industries out to make a profit, except of course their own.
Well, he is partially correct. Any industry is interested in gaining more users.
The beer industry wants any new beer consumers to choose their brand.
Even the tobacco industry, that is required to put warnings on their product about how using it will kill you, does not shed a tear when a new smoker joins their ranks.
What makes the claims so disingenuous is that assumption of malice. Vox assumes that there is an intent to create more alcoholics, or smokers, or murderers, and not the benign effort to get new users to use your product, instead of the competitors.
Keep in mind that the reason Yglesias and others believe this, is because they would behave that way if they had the chance.
Pretty much, which is why folks like him do their best to make more idiots since you have to be an idiot to follow them.
Yep – maybe little mattie ought to cross analyze the beer brewing industry with the automotive industry – I can just see him opining that the two of them are ‘conspiring’ to create more drunk drivers – or something. (insert eye roll here).
The FACT that any product that is misused or abused is potentially capable of causing harm to the user and/or others.