What is the best way to promote “safety” and a general law-and-order sense of the world?
This compelling marketing challenge pops up with great regularity among retailers and real estate developers.
For instance, what if a retailer displays large signs indicating that shoplifters will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law; and that the store is protected by security cameras; and, oh, by the way, if you’d like one of our security guards to walk you to your car in our well-lit parking lot, just give a holler? Is that collective message reassuring — or unsettling?
Should those well-manicured, gated suburban communities go out of their way to explain about the limited access, and the 24-hour security, and the “emergency” telephones around the grounds? Or, would that only call into question who and what is lurking inside and outside those gates?
Connecticut experienced the challenge recently following the horrific home-invasion incident in Cheshire. In response to apparent murders and rapes by two creatures released on parole, state government erupted in press conferences and task forces and solemn pledges to lock up bad guys forever, eliminate or restrict parole, and generally get tough on crime.
Was the political street theater reassuring, or did it suggest that the streets were teeming with crazy guys out on vacation from their halfway houses?
For public schools in general, and public schools in the Northeast in particular, the marketing strategy is soothing reassurance, as in: “We are a gun-free zone,” either by law or by custom.
Of course, this occasionally leads to horrific massacres, when a disturbed student or outsider wanders the halls, killing at random — and often not stopped until the gun is turned on the shooter as a suicide.
Even in Finland, one of the most relaxed nations in the world about gun ownership, an 18-year-old high school student killed six students, the school principal, and a school nurse, with no armed opposition to his rampage — until he turned his gun on himself.
The 1999 school shootings in Colorado, and the killings earlier this year at Virginia Tech, all suggested that the reassurance of a marketing message that promises “no guns,” only works when there are, in fact, no guns.
One option, of course, often exercised by smaller retailers, is the subtle, low-key approach to safety. No signs. No well-lit parking lots. When a 21-year-old thug waltzed into a liquor store in Colorado Springs, Colo., last month, the owner pulled out his own gun and shot him dead.
In Framingham, Mass., this fall, a master criminal walked into a small neighborhood convenience store, pulled a gun, stuck it in the owner’s face, and demanded money. The grocer pulled his own gun, the robber took off, and the grocer shot him a goodbye 45-calibre bullet that, for better or worse, missed the mark.
The term of art for fending off the bad guys with a gun is “virtuous use,” but in the abstract, most folks remain uncomfortable with the notion of just-plain-folks packing pieces.
When the rare discussion arises over whether someone, at school facilities should have a gun stuck away somewhere, just in case, the amusing subtext opposition seems to be that the parents don’t trust the teachers and principals with a gun, either.
“You didn’t do your homework, Bobby? Well, maybe a bullet in the butt will get your attention.”
John Lott, a former senior research scholar at Yale Law School has been the bad-boy scholar of gun ownership for years. He argued, in part, that the mere passage of “right-to-carry” laws for concealed weapons is enough to reduce violent crimes — especially against women.
Even if he is right, the marketing challenge remains difficult to resolve.
Could you imagine the MetroHartford Alliance promoting an “Arm Every Actuary” initiative for downtown Hartford? It’s just not the right tone.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
