The National Shooting Sports Foundation's (NSSF) logo features a young man aiming a shotgun under the watchful eye of an older man, below them is a deer in a forest. Similar imagery is featured in logos used by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

National Rifle Associaition Youth Hunter Education Challenge

These images are attempts to brand the gun industry as focusing on hunting and hunters, but that quaint branding hides the gun lobby's political agenda and the gun industry's increasing emphasis on lethality.

National Shooting Sports Foundation Logo

The gun lobby ceased to be about hunting and hunters long ago, but maintaining that image is a critical marketing tool for the NSSF and the NRA. The NSSF's idea of a modern hunting rifle are AR platforms, such as the M-16 civilian variant AR-15. The blurring of the lines can be explained by the gun industry's need to sell new firearms products to the eroding percentage of the population which owns firearms, when the firearms currently owned by Americans have very long lifetimes. While NSSF may present AR-15's as the modern hunting rifle don't expect them to redo the logo anytime soon.

Of course not all gun lobbyists are afraid of rejecting the hunting label:



The juxtaposition of these two faces was apparent at the 2011 SHOT Show where Kel-Tec salesman Chad Enos discussed his company's new model the KSG shotgun, which holds more then twice as many shots as a police shotgun, 15, and is designed to be as compact as legally possible. As Media Matters' David Holthouse reported not everyone at the SHOT Show was buying Enos' marketing pitch:

“This is good for self-defense, home defense, quail hunting, you name it,” Enos said. “Those gangsters will never know what hit 'em.”

One onlooker, Cedric Steele of Knightcross Publishing, replied, “It's a lot of gun for the price, but the problem is, you're going to wind up selling a lot of them to gangsters.”

“No, no, no, no,” said Enos. “Quail hunters. Not gangbangers. Quail hunters.”

That line got a big laugh.