The AR-15 has been described as "America's rifle" by pro-gun voices and as something akin to a cursed weapon from a fantasy novel by anti-gun advocates. To say it's controversial is putting it mildly.

Yet it's also an extremely common rifle, the most popular rifle model in the United States. This was even acknowledged by anti-gun Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting opinion in Cargill.

And there's a reason why it became so popular.

However, Reuters, in trying to cover that reason, managed to get it wrong. (Via Yahoo!)

The AR platform of rifle - used in several of the most notorious and deadly mass shootings in American history in the past two decades - is in the spotlight again because a would-be assassin used one on Saturday to shoot former President Donald Trump, grazing him on the ear.

Deft marketing and the partisan divide have helped drive many Americans' embrace of this style of gun, making it a potent cultural and political symbol in a country where the Constitution's Second Amendment enshrines the right to bear arms.

"The romanticism around the AR-15s comes from marketing," said Carolyn Gallaher, an American University professor whose research has in part focused on militia violence and who has followed the rise of AR-style guns. "It's like theater."

"Gun manufacturers are trying to sell a product and they have done so in a way that taps into some visceral things, like hyper-masculinity, the notions of safety and protection and tapping into the soldier ethos," she said.

The gun industry's marketing was at the center of a successful lawsuit lodged against Remington Arms by some parents of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and is an argument being used by parents of children killed in the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in their lawsuits against gunmaker Daniel Defense, along with Meta and Activision Blizzard. The gunmen in both those shootings used an AR-15 style weapon.

That's cute.

First, the lawsuit was settled by the insurance company, not Remington Arms. That's important to remember because the insurance company was just interested in ending the lawsuit, not the precedent that might be set by their actions.

But marketing had nothing to do with the rise of the AR-15's popularity.

No, that's because of anti-gun politicians.

AR-15s have been available to the general public since they were first developed. For more than 60 years now, people could buy AR-style rifles in various calibers and use them for whatever lawful purpose they so desired.

For decades, that wasn't a problem. Then in the 1990s, a push began to ban the private ownership of these weapons. A small handful of mass shootings took place involving these style weapons and politicians decided we had to "do something" about it. They passed the Assault Weapon Ban of 1994.

Before then, most gun folks weren't overly interested in the AR-style rifles. A few had them, of course, but most gun people were interested in other styles of weapons.

Yet when the government decided we could no longer own a certain type of weapon, people got interested real quick.

There are two primary reasons governments ban something. One is that it's considered dangerous to the people, which is the argument that gun control advocates typically make. The other, though, is that it's dangerous to the government.

We know that the Founding Fathers preserved our right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment because of this latter reason and a lot of people looked at the AR-15 differently once the anti-gun zealots declared jihad against these rifles. Folks realized that the AR-15 was dangerous to the government and that was the reason why people were against it.

People started buying them like they were going out of style because, if Democrats in Congress got their way, they would.

In the process, though, people found that these were great guns. They were lightweight and ergonomic. With a collapsible stock, they were easily adjustable for various size sh ooters. They had low recoil and good accuracy. On so many levels, they were ideal little rifles. 

So when the ban sunset, the popularity of the AR-15 continued.

Yes, marketing for these guns exist, but they're not for AR-15s as a whole, but are brand specific. It's Remington Arms or Daniel Defense or any of a hundred different manufacturers trying to get more of the market share. It's like car ads. An ad for Honda or Ford isn't an ad for SUVs as a whole. They're ads for Honda or Ford.

Likewise, the gun marketing is trying to get people not to buy just any old AR-style rifle, but that company's specific AR-style rifle. They do it because the guns are popular, but there are a thousand or more options.

None of that marketing got people to make these guns popular though. We had the anti-gun zealots to do that for them.