The timing was grim.
Last Monday — just hours before a school shooter in Nashville killed 3 children and 3 adults — the Washington Post published a long story about AR-15s.
Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22 sport semi-automatic rifle. The initials mean “Military & Police.”
The semi-automatic weapon, designed by the military, has become the best-selling rifle in the US. Sixteen million Americans — 1 out of every 20 adults — owns at least one.
The Nashville killer used an AR-15 — along with a 9 mm pistol and Smith & Wesson handgun — to shoot his way into the school, and mow down his victims.
Like many people, Harry Falber was horrified.
Unlike many, the longtime Weston resident knew exactly how the AR-15 has become mass murderers’ weapon of choice.
He was there, as Smith & Wesson head of licensing, when the company pivoted from promoting it as a “fine-tuned machine” to “the chosen one.”
Complete with high-testosterone imagery, deliberately meant to appeal to “right wingers, and young impressionable minds.”
Farber got out. He left Smith & Wesson 2 months before Sandy Hook.
But until the Washington Post story, he’d never spoken in detail about the AR-15’s rise from a gun unsuited for hunting, and overkill for home defense, to a revered icon of power.
And a symbol of all that is wrong with America today.
Falber — now 76 years old — had a long career in advertising (in the “Mad Men” era), and marketing consulting for products like baby food, flowers, Volvo, Polaroid and Hallmark. In 2011, connections with an Alcoa executive brought him to Smith & Wesson.
Harry Falber, in his Weston home. (Photo/George Etheridge for the Washington Post)
The company — founded in Norwich, Connecticut in 1852 as a rifle and pistol manufacturer — fell on hard times in 2000. A boycott organized by the NRA and Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation over “smart guns” (firearms that can detect only authorized users) brought it near bankruptcy.
Its recovery included a new focus on big box retailers — and a shift in marketing.
Surveys showed that US consumers ranked Smith & Wesson very high on “integrity,” Falber told “06880” a few days after the Post interview. But top officials were moving toward what he calls “the sporting rifle Kool-Aid. They went full-bore into a dark, dark milieu.”
Falber was stunned when the ad he thought would be used — the one highlighting craftsmanship and precision, and which scored very high in an independent survey — was scrapped in favor of one with images of a SWAT officer, aiming ferociously at an unseen target.
Left: The ad that scored highly in surveys, and which Harry Falber thought would be used. Right: The ad that was used. (Courtesy of Washington Post)
The tagline — “The Ultimate Shooting Machine” — bothered him for two reasons.
One was its possible trademark infringement on BMW’s long-running “Ultimate Driving Machine.”
The other was the appeal to “an element of this country we shouldn’t want to speak to.”
He quit. Two months later, a few miles from his Weston home, Adam Lanza killed his mother, 20 children, 6 adults and himself, with 2 handguns and a semi-automatic rifle.
The fact that it was made by Bushmaster — not Smith & Wesson — was little solace.
For over a decade, his former company had been at the forefront of marketing a product meant to address “feelings of inadequacy,” Falber says. “The whole idea was to make (a buyer) feel bigger, stronger, better.
“There are various ways to sell. You can appeal to base instincts, or do it at a higher level.”
The aftermath of the Nashville shooting was particularly galling. Falber was appalled to see politicians fundraising off of the murders, and wearing lapel pins in the shape of an AR-15.
Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee’s 2021 Christmas card. The Covenant School, where last week’s shooting occurred, is part of his district.
Smith & Wesson is not backing down. Recently, Falber says, they introduced a new handgun that holds 22 rounds of ammunition, and a carbine with 63 rounds that folds to fit in a backpack.
“I don’t see the unmet need for that,” Falber says.
But his former colleagues at Smith & Wesson do.
Falber has spent 26 years in Weston. His wife is the principal of the intermediate school.
Every day he thinks about her, and her students.
And he wonders about their safety, on what should be the idyllic woods of School Road.
(Click here to read the full Washington Post story. Hat tip: Peter Blau)
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