54% of Boys Report Regularly Seeing Firearm Content Online

A man with bulging biceps, tattoos down to his wrists, and a neatly trimmed beard walks on screen next to two women with glossy hair and perfectly done makeup. An assault rifle drops into the man’s hands as he lets out an expletive, and he turns and fires the gun at a distant target. A graphically enhanced blast from the gun blows the women’s clothes off, leaving her in her underwear.

This YouTube video has racked up 10 million views to date. How many of them were boys under 18? According to recently released research from the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, the answer is that boys are seeing hypersexualized gun content like this online much more often than parents think.

This survey comes at a time when boys are inundated with confusing societal messages about manhood, and firearms continue to be the leading cause of death for children and teenagers. Nicole Hockley, the co-founder and co-CEO of Sandy Hook Promise, believes this makes for a dangerous mix. 

“This kind of marketing preys on young boys’ insecurities and how they see themselves. It’s the same kind of messaging that influenced the shooter who murdered my son and 25 others at Sandy Hook Elementary. This type of marketing isn’t just irresponsible—it’s dangerous and it has deadly consequences,” she tells Parents. 

Raising Awareness About Gun Marketing

This latest research is a part of the nonprofit’s UnTargeting Kids campaign, which seeks to raise awareness about gun manufacturers’ marketing to children. A Remington Arms marketing brief obtained during a lawsuit Sandy Hook Promise brought against the gunmaker clearly stated that ‘youth’ was among the company’s primary target audiences.

Sandy Hook Promise is also using the campaign to promote solutions that lawmakers, gun manufacturers, social media developers, and parents can implement. While the video described above is not intended for children, for example, social media loopholes make this kind of content easily accessible to them.

Tech industry experts like Titania Jordan, the Chief Marketing Officer for Bark Technologies, a parental controls company that helps families keep their kids safe online and in real life, agrees with and applauds Sandy Hook Promise for taking this approach.

“This is absolutely an urgent issue. Every day, children are being harmed because of unmonitored, unfiltered tech access,” she says. 

The goal of Sandy Hook Promise’s recent survey was to better understand how firearm ads reach boys online, how they impact their views on guns, and whether parents know this content is reaching their kids.

The survey included boys ages 10 to 17 and parents of boys in the same age bracket. Participants came from households both with and without firearms. It is also worth noting that Sandy Hook Promise includes influencer-generated content in their definition of firearm ads because it is likely that at least some influencers are receiving payments or free products for their content.

How Gun Marketing is Reaching Young Boys

More than half of the boys surveyed (54%) reported seeing sexually charged firearm content at least once a week. But boys in households with guns were even more likely to be exposed to this content, and boys who frequently played video games were more than two times more likely to see sexually charged gun content than those who didn’t. Thirty-two percent of the boys follow influencers who promote firearms, and 38% had clicked on a firearm ad.

Meanwhile, only 27% of parents are aware that their child follows influencers who promote firearms.

“When we show some of the ads to parents, they’re shocked because it’s not coming through their [own] feeds,” Hockley says.

Most notably, 77% of both parents and boys agree that companies should not be allowed to advertise firearms to children under 18. This could indicate that boys are not comfortable with this content, and may even be able to identify on some level that it’s harmful.

A 2023 report published by Sandy Hook Promise also points out that in some cases, boys are not even seeking out this type of content; the social media algorithms are feeding it to them.

When ‘Being a Man’ Means Shooting a Gun

Sandy Hook Promise takes the stance that children and teenagers are “biologically disadvantaged” against gun manufacturers’ marketing strategies. Research on the adolescent brain supports this. Until the brain is fully developed, which happens in the mid-twenties, a person is more sensitive to rewarding experiences and less able to control their impulses, regulate their emotions, and understand the consequences of their actions.

Boys today are surrounded by messages that tell them being a man is about being tough, always in control, and surrounded by attractive women. This is an impossible and unrealistic vision of manhood that sets boys up for failure, disappointment, and frustration. But online gun content seems to target and feed into this insecurity by telling boys that a gun is a shortcut to achieving this vision. In other words, what’s being sold through this kind of marketing strategy is much more than just a gun.

Layer that on top of the teen mental health crisis—40% of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness—and it becomes clear how detrimental this kind of messaging can be.

“We’re not saying [gun manufacturers should] stop marketing firearms,” Hockley says. “We’re saying do it in an ethical way that includes ensuring that kids aren’t seeing this

.”

How Parents Can Protect Against Gun Marketing

Jordan encourages parents to acquaint themselves with this type of gun content.

“Until you see what your children are seeing, you’re not going to realize the problem,” she says. She also provided several recommendations to help parents manage their children’s relationship to technology.

• Don’t allow phones in bedrooms or behind closed doors. When phones are needed for homework, it should happen in a shared area of the house.
• Explore the apps your kids want to use. Parents can explore apps first before kids download them to get a sense of what the app environment is like.
• Monitor video game ratings. They help protect developing minds from harmful messages and content that might be too strong for them. 
• Teach media literacy. Understanding that “free” platforms aren’t really free helps kids think more critically about their digital decisions. 
• Talk about games where shooting and killing are the primary focus. Conversations with kids about killing games help to ensure they are not being desensitized. 
• Screenshot inappropriate gun marketing content and circulate it. When other parents experience this content, they are more likely to get involved and push for change.

There is also a petition on Sandy Hook Promise’s website urging lawmakers to ban the advertising of firearms to children in the same way that alcohol and tobacco have been banned from being marketed to them. 

Surveys like the one from Sandy Hook Promise give parents critical insight into what is happening in boys’ worlds right now. For as long as it continues to reach children, hypersexualized gun marketing can never be categorized as purely entertainment content. Watching pretty women getting their clothes blown off by a gun shapes how boys view the world and their place in it. Parents should be able to control who and what informs this worldview—not an algorithm and not gun manufacturers.