This image summarizes the social issue both created by and manipulated by assault rifle manufacturers in the USA.

The entire idea of "Gun Culture" has been subverted, re-invented, and exploited by manufacturers like Bushmaster and Daniel Defense.

That culture used to mean owning guns responsibility for serious purposes.

Now that culture has been downplayed and reinvented to sell more guns to people who don't need them. To people who can't afford them. To people who should never have them in the first place.

This is a commercial culture. Not one built on virtue, reason, and civic-mindedness. This one is built on mass appeal, impulse buying, and emotional exploitation.

These advertisers want to instill a fear of others in you, so they can exploit it and make you buy a gun to protect you from these fabricated sources of your fear.

These advertisers want to instill a fear of being unmanly in you, so they can exploit it and make you buy a gun to ineffectively try to signal your manliness to yourself and others in a desperate plea to have your testosterone recognized. (It won't work).

These advertisers want to instill a fear of collapse in you, so you can buy their guns to make it easier for you to play out imaginary Mad Max scenarios in your head where you're the hero.

They build you up to hate the world, hate yourself, hate your neighbor, hate your future -- so you can buy a gun and make sure that you can put a bullet in that thing you hate.

The gun suicide rate for handgun owners is eight times higher for men. For women, it's thirty-five times higher.

So that fear of the world, and that hatred of the self, that these gun manufacturer advertisers build up in you remains after you pay them their money and you get your shoddy made assault rifle.

More than anyone, owners of handguns are harmed by handguns.

So the ironic part is this: Even though their advertisements seek to fulfill your lack of self-worth by promising to make you into an apex-predator, what they really do is make you into their most susceptible and easy to target prey.

You're preyed on financially by their outrageous prices for cheaply made guns. You're preyed on emotionally through their exploitative advertising campaigns. You're preyed on literally by putting yourself in danger by just owning a firearm.

And most of all, the entire responsible gun-ownership movement is preyed on by completely discrediting gun-ownership entirely.

The schizophrenic, self-hating, emasculated portrait of the average gun owner that companies like Bushmaster and Daniel Defense are building on purpose has done more to harm gun-ownership interests than absolutely anything else.

When gun ownership becomes completely illegal, you can have these despicable companies to blame for it. They are what transformed the culture of responsibility into a culture of hate, fear, and trigger-happiness.