A few days ago, A Girl and Her Gun posted this as her status on Facebook:

Got a request to post about a site(I have received several recently, some are good). It’s a gun range and the tagline is fun and safety. Big long section on attention to detail and saefty. The site has a host of half naked chicks ALL with their guns in the air and ALL with fingers on the trigger. Anyone want to guess what my answer was??

Like AGirl, I don’t care a bit how a woman chooses to make her living, as long as it’s legal and harms no one else. However, I agree with her that the image of women handling firearms dangerously or carelessly isn’t one I want to promote and it sure isn’t one I want to encourage. That’s something I’ve worked against for more than ten years now, after all. The old joke about how guys won’t even notice the firearm in the picture—let alone what the woman’s trigger finger is doing—just doesn’t cut it for me. I wouldn’t want to be associated with any company that pictures dangerous behavior in their ads.

But there’s something else I wanted to say about this. Two things, really. First, I’m a capitalist and a believer in both free speech and a free market. When marketing offends or simply fails to reach its intended audience, the audience should simply walk away. And for the most part, we do. I don’t have a problem with this at all. It’s the way things should work in a free society.

My second point relates directly to my first: I avoid buying guns or gun-related products from companies that use near-naked, “sex sells” marketing because such ads make it clear that the company does not want my business, or the business of any other woman. Oh, they’re happy enough to sell stuff to us, if we’re willing to buy it from them. But they aren’t after our business. Marketing efforts like this just show that the company marketing managers don’t believe women are part of the gun-buying public, and that they don’t care whether we buy from them or not. If they did want our dollars, they would tone down the pure sex sale, and go instead for an approach that could appeal to all of us.

When a company isn’t after our business, why should we give it to them?