industry sponsors, where women in floor-length gowns pose for the cameras alongside men in suits and tactical balaclavas. This is the Gundies, the annual award ceremony for the firearm content creator community held in mid-January, and it is designed to look like the Oscars of the Second Amendment. A few floors up in a hotel bathroom, Jamie Villamor is getting ready for the event with a friend. Villamor is a competitive shooter, a former top-10 swimsuit and lingerie model, and a content creator with 2 million Instagram followers. She spent the day on the range testing new platforms for the legacy Italian gun manufacturer Beretta, attended a first-of-its-kind concealed-carry fashion runway the night before, and is presenting a Gundie award tonight. Her friend, Anna Taylor, the founder of a concealed-carry holster company based in Kansas City, is debating tennis shoes or heels for the evening. Her nails are themed, with one hand branded with Women for Gun Rights. “I always do my index finger. That’s my trigger finger, so it shows up nice,” she tells Villamor. For both women, this is the biggest week on the firearm industry calendar. SHOT Show, the annual trade expo that draws tens of thousands to Las Vegas, opens tomorrow morning. But tonight represents the cultural side of the business: the place where an online world becomes a physical one, where women who have only ever known each other through screens are comparing holsters and hugging hello for the first time. The ceremony—which is being live streamed for the first time tonight, with awards like Influencer of the Year, Breakout Creator of the Year—is now in its seventh edition. When Villamor hits the red carpet to pose for photographs, a woman leans toward her partner and asks who she is. “A huge deal in our industry,” he says. A decade ago, the firearm industry had no idea how to reach women. But something has shifted in America’s relationship with guns. Women are now the fastest-growing demographic of new firearm owners in the country, and a booming class of female content creators has risen alongside them. They are reshaping the image, reach, and economics of gun culture from their phones, building businesses and influence in a space whose marketing was, until very recently, almost entirely male. On their feeds, firearms show up between skincare routines and school drop-offs.
Every new woman who buys a gun is a potential new follower; every new creator who makes the lifestyle look aspirational brings more women in. It’s a cycle that is remaking an industry, a culture, and—depending on whom you ask—the safety of American women.
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nside the Venetian Theatre in Las Vegas, a chandelier the size of a small car hangs over a packed house. Red velvet drapes frame gilded balcony boxes, and organizers hustle backstage. Around the entrance, a red carpet runs past a wall of firearm
Left: Jamie Villamor during an interview at the Venetian Theatre. Right: Villamor on the red carpet at the Gundies.
her contractions started, she left home, but chose not to go to Al-Awda Hospital because of the danger. Instead, she went to a tent clinic newly set up in central Gaza by the International Medical Corps. Pain relief was not available for her eight-hour delivery, so she had to work through excruciating contractions. Against all odds, her baby boy was born healthy. She named him Yamen, which meant “generosity and ease,” something she longed for.
Abed stayed at the hospital for just a few hours after the birth and then went home because there wasn’t space to keep women for long. There, she groaned in pain and bled for days. But she was able to breastfeed, and Yamen thrived. Food was scarce but enough. She imagined a better future, of taking him to schools and parks and restaurants. Of having ease again.
At Al-Awda Hospital, Al-Nashef was nearing the end of her six-week medical mission. When a bomb went off, she instinctively knew to jump away from the glass because the IDF usually struck a second time. One of her fellow midwives had nearly lost her arm to shrapnel. She'd spoken to young boys who acted like men, including one who held his brother in pieces. She'd watched as more women gave birth to preterm babies, like Alreqeb’s wife had, likely from the stress of war.
One day in July, Al-Nashef heard a drone outside the hospital that she thought was a “zenana,” which means “buzzing” in Arabic—an IDF drone that is loud on purpose to let people know they’re under surveillance. But it was a quadcopter, a far more terrifying drone with four rotors that can kill people at close range. Al-Nashef was helping a woman push out her baby when the quadcopter started shooting. The woman panicked. “I said, ‘Forget about it, no one is coming close, just have the baby,’” Al-Nashef said. “I’m suturing her and hearing the firing, trying to calm her down, and you just have no idea what’s going on.”
Where before her colleagues were overworked, now “they are holding on by a thread,” she said. “They went to work, helped people have their babies…but they’re so exhausted, they kind of dissociate.” When Al-Nashef finally left Gaza for home, she immediately began thinking about returning later this year. She struggled with guilt at having left her colleagues behind. “Something about Gaza takes a piece of your heart and leaves it there,” she said.
In Cairo, Alreqeb’s daughter, Salma, received a much-needed surgery. Between shifts at the hospital, Alreqeb speaks to his wife and daughters over WhatsApp as often as he can. All he wants, all any ordinary person in Gaza wants—the mothers, the humanitarian agencies, the doctors and midwives—is a ceasefire so the war can end. Some days he sounds deeply sad, other days he speaks with fight in his voice. “Maybe you hear that people of Gaza, they love death, or they know nothing except death,” he said by voice note in June. “But actually,” he told me, “we people of Gaza, we love life.”
Abed had loved her life before the war; being a mom, working with her husband on building their own graphic design company as they saved for a house. Alreqeb loved his life, too: watching romantic movies with Issra at home, taking his daughter to restaurants, bringing life into the world without bombs. His tent clinic, he said, is the seed of a larger idea; he wants to build his own maternity hospital after the war, when all of Gaza is rebuilding—and being reborn.
her contractions started, she left home, but chose not to go to Al-Awda Hospital because of the danger. Instead, she went to a tent clinic newly set up in central Gaza by the International Medical Corps. Pain relief was not available for her eight-hour delivery, so she had to work through excruciating contractions. Against all odds, her baby boy was born healthy. She named him Yamen, which meant “generosity and ease,” something she longed for.
How a new wave of female social media personalities became the firearm industry’s most valuable weapon.
BY NOOR IBRAHIM
The Gunfluencer Effect
The restrictions are largely self-imposed by the media companies, not mandated by law, but the result is the same: a multibillion-dollar industry with almost no way to reach consumers through traditional marketing. Social media platforms add another layer: Meta, Google, and others restrict firearm companies from directly running paid ads. But individual creators operate under looser rules. Aimee Huff, a marketing researcher at Oregon State University who studies gun consumer culture, has spent years tracking what those creators have built in that gap. Influencers “get far more latitude than what a retailer like Cabela’s or a manufacturer would have,” she tells me on a video call in February. A gun company can’t run a targeted ad for its new pistol on Instagram, but a creator with a sponsorship deal can post a video of herself shooting that same pistol, tag the brand, and reach an audience of millions. “In the gun space, the ball is definitely in the influencer’s court,” she says. “They have much more leverage than maybe in makeup, personal care, jewelry—whatever other categories where industry is able to use conventional marketing channels.”
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he math behind the “gunfluencer” economy starts with a vacuum. Gun manufacturers cannot advertise the way other companies do. ESPN, NBC, mainstream newspapers—the conventional channels are all effectively closed.
“In the gun space, the ball is definitely in the influencer’s court.”
For an industry whose loudest advocates, from lobbies and manufacturers to political action groups, have become as polarizing as the product itself, creators offer something no ad buy can replicate: a messenger the audience sees as one of them. The numbers bear that out: According to a 2020 study, the top 12 gun influencers on Instagram had accumulated 6.1 billion channel views on YouTube and X, compared to 98 million for manufacturers’ own content. Huff describes it as “a mutually reinforcing relationship” between the gun industry, which is always seeking new customers but cannot advertise through conventional channels, and female creators with specific skills in producing visually compelling content. Villamor is a case study in what that leverage looks like. A single mom with two daughters and a steady modeling career, she stumbled into the firearm world in 2017, when her agent pushed her toward an Australian production that planned to take 50 women with zero firearm experience and train them from the ground up. She agreed, and over the course of a brutal casting and training process, discovered that she loved to shoot. The show never aired, but it didn’t matter: Villamor had found the thing that would define the next chapter of her life. “When I am on the range, everything else is quiet,” she tells me in a mid-December video call. “It’s almost like a meditative state.” And for a single mom whose home had been broken into multiple times, it gave her something else: a sense of control. “We are our own first responders,” she says. “No one’s coming to save us.”
Left: Cathy McKinnon at SHOT Show. Right: Villamor with McKinnon at the Syndicus Defense booth.
Left: Lynda Anthony at The Venetian. Right: Anthony and Justine Williams.
Left: Kris Chanski at The Range 702 in Las Vegas. Right: Chanski during her interview.
Left: Sofia Espina during her interview. Right: The Gundie awards at the Venetian Theatre.
Read more stories from our Women and Gun series.
She researched mentors to train with, began shooting competitively, and picked up her first firearm sponsors, eventually representing the United States at the World Shoot in the Czech Republic. The sponsorship deals grew from there: one- to two year-long endorsements, monthly salaries, her sponsors’ names on her jersey as she traveled the world to compete. The deals formalized, and content creation became part of the arrangement. She estimates that previously, her following was roughly 90 percent male, a standard ratio for a swimsuit model. But when she started posting firearm content alongside her modeling work, the ratio shifted to about 60-40. Women were flooding in with messages: “Can you help me? This is so inspiring. I’m so afraid to even touch a gun. When my husband goes to work, he leaves it here. I don’t think that I could do it.” Others were simpler: “If you can do this, I can do it.” That dynamic, one woman’s visibility becoming another woman’s entry point, is the engine behind the growth of female gun culture online, according to Huff. In peer-reviewed research, she and her co-authors identified the tactics that make it work: “glamorizing” firearms through polished lifestyle photography and embedding them alongside everyday products like coffee and makeup so that guns become “artifacts of everyday life.” A woman who would never search for a gun review might find a concealed-carry outfit post, a range-day vlog, or a motherhood account where a Glock sits next to a diaper bag. “The influencers, by nature of their high-fidelity content and understanding of their viewer base, are really able to disseminate very compelling content about not only what guns are and how to use them safely,” Huff says, “but also really normalizing them.”
Scroll through Villamor’s Instagram and you can see what Huff means. Magazine covers sit next to Christmas photos with her daughters. A Sedona hiking trip, a hot yoga session, then a Beretta range day in a fitted white top, her daughters firing pistols with explosions in the background, an AR-style rifle shot from the ground. The captions wrap sponsorships in the language of self-help—gratitude, intention-setting, daily affirmations—with brands tagged at the bottom. You could scroll past it the way you’d scroll past a skincare ad. For Villamor, that is precisely the point. She believes women should see guns as an empowering part of their everyday lives, and views her platform as a corrective to “misinformation” about the risks of gun ownership in the media, a way of “enabling women and people in general to feel comfortable in that space and give them a little education on it.” She draws her own lines about how it should look. In her view, what counts as irresponsible is a safety violation, like a creator filming with their finger on the trigger before they’re ready to fire or a kid handling a weapon recklessly. And she won’t go so far as to “show up in a swimsuit to shoot a gun because I want to be respected in this industry,” she says, and “you might get hit with some hot brass, so it’s not going to feel good.” But she sees no ethical distinction between promoting a moisturizer and promoting a firearm. “If a brand approaches me and I’m like, oh my gosh, I love your moisturizer, I’m in,” she says. When asked whether she thinks of her gun content the same way as a beauty or fashion deal, she answers, “100 percent.”
manufacturers to retailers and creators, spreading across 800,000 square feet of exhibition space. For content creators, it’s an audition and a casting call rolled into one, with deals getting made at booths, in back rooms, and over drinks. Cathy McKinnon, the chief operating officer of Syndicus Defense Corp., a California-based firearm manufacturer, stands behind a row of black pedestals displaying her company’s rifles and scans the crowd. She oversees Syndicus’s influencer strategy, working with four to five creators at a time and scouting for new talent at events like this one. What she’s looking for, in her own words, are “women who can be multifaceted and post defense content alongside beauty and fashion and makeup—and all of those things that women enjoy—to show women that this can be a part of your life. You can be fashionable and incredible and beautiful, and a mother and a wife and all those things, and still know how to protect yourself and your family.” Not every creator fills that mold the same way. Some feeds lean more glamorous, some more tactical. Others blend firearms with fitness, faith, or motherhood. But McKinnon is scouting across all of them, looking for creators who can strike a balance between relatability and authority. “I’m keeping my eyes on folks,” she says. “We don’t want necessarily just follower count. We want those that can speak and articulate the message and educate consumers. We want people who can go from IG Stories to the range.” Once a creator passes the vetting, Syndicus initiates a contract—typically short-term at first, a trial run with a scorecard at the end. The company tracks everything: views, clicks, comments, whether the content translated to actual customers. If the metrics hold, the deal extends.
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f the Gundies are the Oscars of the “gunfluencer” world, SHOT Show is the marketplace. For four days every January, tens of thousands of people flood the Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum convention centers, from firearm brands and
“We want people who can go from IG Stories to the range.”
The compensation varies widely, and most creators are bound by NDAs that prevent them from sharing specifics. Villamor estimates that creators in the firearm space have the potential to earn well into six figures in an industry where the marketing is “still very old school” and the opportunity for digital-native creators is enormous. “There are shooters that are world champions, and I will make more than someone that is a better shooter than me,” she says, “because my marketing ability is different than theirs.” By Huff’s estimates, social media influencers drove between 1 and 1.5 million incremental firearm sales in 2025 alone, worth up to $825 million in retail revenue. Since 2020, that figure’s climbed to roughly 6 million sales and $3.5 billion at retail, not including ammunition, accessories, gear, or training. For an industry that spends less than 1 percent of its revenue on advertising (a fraction of what comparable consumer markets spend), influencers have become the de facto marketing engine—particularly for first-time buyers, women, and minority groups, the fastest-growing segments since 2020. Those numbers are all the more striking given that creators, who can sidestep the paid advertising bans that shut out manufacturers, still face their own barriers. Across the board, women in this space described the same frustrations about their content being suppressed and their accounts getting shadow banned. Meta’s default settings classify gun posts alongside drugs and violence as “sensitive content,” filtering them out of discovery feeds for users who don’t already follow the creator. Yet the sales keep climbing. And their influence doesn’t stop at reach. Many of these women have gone beyond promoting products to building them as entrepreneurs in a market they helped create. Concealed-carry holsters designed around a woman’s body, shapewear that hides a firearm, crossbody bags with hidden magnetic compartments that look like nothing more than a nice purse. Others are launching businesses, events, and platforms that didn’t exist five years ago. Each new venture gives creators one more thing to post about, one more brand deal to negotiate, and one more reason for the next woman to follow along.
Kris Chanski, who runs a Las Vegas shooting range and built her own social media presence out of frustration with the industry’s advertising restrictions, helped create Project Gunway, a concealed-carry fashion runway show that debuted in Vegas this year. Speaking from the VIP room of The Range 702, where caterers passed appetizers and portraits of firearms lined the walls during a SHOT Show week event, she says she had been wanting to create a women-forward event but couldn’t land on the concept—until this summer. “I saw influencers walking a runway, and I thought, that’s it. We have to have [firearm] influencers walking a runway showing off how they can conceal carry, showing off how you can still be feminine and dress however you want while protecting yourself.” Sofia Espina, a firearm instructor and content creator from Utah who left medical school to enter the industry, recently co-founded a marketing collective to represent other creators and negotiate their brand deals. That work has given her more perspective on how certain brands handle their marketing. “It’s easy to get swept up in that storm of exposure,” she says in a quiet room beneath the Venetian during the Gundies. “A brand approaches you and it feels really good and it’s easy to not vet them well and to get excited over money.” She explains that while some companies supplement their products with education, safety content, and community, others “simply need to sell and make you feel like if you don’t have this one piece, then you’re not in luck,” which she views as exploiting women’s fear of violence to move product. There are other pitfalls, Espina adds, including pressure on content creators to sexualize their content. “It is very easy to be encouraged to show parts of your body, present yourself a certain way for a certain outcome,” Espina says. “It’s encouraged very much, and it’s masked as sometimes women’s empowerment even.”
described a version of that feeling. Villamor’s home was broken into while her daughters were there and she wasn’t. McKinnon was assaulted in her small hometown in Illinois—a single mother who realized she couldn’t protect herself or her son. “Being in that position where you are helpless is not something that I wanted to feel for myself or my family,” she says. Chanski had a restraining order against a violent family member: “That piece of paper doesn’t make you feel safe.” They often frame that reckoning in terms that cut across political lines. “The last few years in this country haven’t been full of rainbows and sunshine, and women in general probably don’t feel safe, and we want to feel safe,” Chanski says. “It is transcending beyond political beliefs, and it really comes down to we have to keep ourselves safe. That’s it.” Huff recognizes the appeal. “People who don’t understand why guns are so appealing to women don’t understand how viscerally empowering it is for a woman to hold and fire a gun,” she says. “Having the ability to deploy lethal force in your hand in a world where women are always on alert for physical victimization.” Dianna Muller, a retired law enforcement officer of 22 years and the founder of Women for Gun Rights, an advocacy organization, has spent the past decade making that case publicly. In a December video call, she called guns “a great equalizer when it comes to someone [imposing] their will on you when you don’t want them to,” and argued that it was the feminist movement itself that laid the groundwork. “We’ve told women that they don’t need a man, that they can do whatever men can do,” Muller says. “And when it comes to physical violence, that is not necessarily the case. So it makes sense to me that women would be attracted to the firearm.”
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here is a version of this story that ends with empowerment. Women finding community, building businesses, taking control of their own safety in a world that often fails to protect them. Almost every woman interviewed for this story
“People who don’t understand why guns are so appealing to women don’t understand how viscerally empowering it is for a woman to hold and fire a gun.”
But Huff doesn’t believe the empowerment narrative tells the whole story. Gun content made by women and aimed at women, she says, is two and a half times more likely to reference self-defense than content made by and for men. She pointed to Stand Your Ground laws, which in theory allow anyone to use lethal force without a duty to retreat. In practice, courts and juries are far more likely to view men—particularly white men—as having acted out of reasonable fear, while women who use firearms are more likely to be framed as aggressors: overly emotional, vengeful, or unwilling to leave. “The self-protection, personal-empowerment framing of why women should want guns doesn’t actually hold up in practice if they do it,” Huff says. “I think that’s a huge, huge ethical problem.” She invokes the term “gender-washed empowerment,” systemic risks of violence against women, reframed as individual problems a woman can solve by carrying a gun. The data supports her concern. Studies show that access to a firearm in the home significantly increases the risk of homicide for women, and that the vast majority of women killed in their homes by firearms are killed by a spouse or intimate partner. Yet the marketing overwhelmingly depicts the threat as a stranger: someone breaking through a window or attacking in a parking lot. “We don’t see any depictions that might imply that the woman gun owner could use the gun against an abusive boyfriend who takes it one step too far,” Huff says. “We don’t see that because it doesn’t map on with what we think about as legitimate self-defense.” The broader context is also hard to ignore. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States, and gun violence kills roughly 48,000 Americans a year. At some point, everyone in this industry has had to square what they do with what the data says it costs. Villamor has been on the other side of the numbers. She was at the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. She helped tourniquet a woman who had been shot twice, tried to push another in a wheelchair, and spent hours not knowing whether her stepdaughter, who was also at the concert, was alive. The experience left her uneasy around fireworks or crowds, but it did not change her mind about guns. If anything, it hardened her resolve: The concert had been a gun-free zone, and for Villamor, that was the lesson.
“The self-protection, personal-empowerment framing of why women should want guns doesn’t actually hold up in practice if they do it.”
her nails in the passenger seat while her husband took the wheel. Anthony has loved this sport since she was 13, shooting once a month at a freezing gun club in her hometown of Elko, Nevada, with her dad while her twin sister did cheerleading. “I’m a short blonde girl, petite, and, oh, I shoot guns for a living. It kind of throws people off sometimes,” she tells me in a touch-up room at the venue. Her biggest goal right now, besides winning the next Rifle World Shoot, is growing her Instagram. But what she values most in this space has nothing to do with followers: It’s her best friend, Justine Williams, 21, who is also one of the top female competitive shooters in the country. They have known each other since they were children and grew up together inside this sport. Anthony will serve as maid of honor at Williams’s wedding next year. They have been side by side all evening, sharing a lipstick from Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty line, talking about bridesmaid dress shopping, and debating whether last night’s concealed-carry fashion runway was actually about concealed carry or just lingerie. “The whole thing about this community is you meet really great people that stick with you for a lifetime,” Williams says. “And I can really say that with Lynn.” The women in this industry lean on each other, and they often need to. Villamor spent years earning respect from men who saw a swimsuit model with a gun and assumed the worst. Espina received death threats when she began posting gun content. Chanski said that minutes before sitting down for our interview, a male guest at her range had asked her if her gun was real, “and I would bet my life that not one of the men in this building were asked that question.” Anthony had a man message her on Instagram for two years without her noticing, until he suddenly showed up at an event she was attending. But every one of them described the same counterweight: other women who became their closest friends. “It really does help having my best friend who also shoots competition. She’s been through it too. I can ask her anything, and she’s just going to be honest with me, and it just keeps me going,” Anthony says, especially “during the hard days where I’m not so sure about how I’m feeling, if I’m going the right direction.” Eleven years of friendship built on a firing range. It’s a small story inside the biggest shift in American gun culture in a generation. In the year ahead, more women will buy their first firearms. More creators will post range days alongside school drop-offs and skincare routines, and more women will find that content and see something that looks like an answer. Somewhere, a woman with a restraining order will decide a piece of paper isn’t enough. Somewhere else, a gun in a home will be used in exactly the way the marketing never depicts. The cycle will keep turning, and it does not distinguish between the women it empowers and the women it buries. The next day, Williams posts a carousel of her and Anthony to Instagram. In one photo they’re in dresses and heels, a lighted mirror glowing behind them. Swipe and they’re on the range, rifles out, Colt banner in the desert sun. “From dirty on the range to slaying in Vegas,” the caption reads. She sets the post to “Nothin’ But a Good Time,” the 1988 hair metal anthem by Poison. The chorus blares: How can I resist?
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he Gundies go late. Awards are being handed out, and drinks are flowing. For Lynda Anthony, it’s her first one. The 27-year-old professional competitive shooter and multi-time national champion drove four hours from Arizona, painting
Left: Villamor and Anna Taylor getting ready for the Gundies. Right: Villamor heading to the Gundies with friends.
Produced and Narrated by Noor Ibrahim, Executive Producer: Andrea Stanley, Supervising Editor: Sam Schultz, Video Editor: Jacqueline Kulla, Videographer: Riccardo Mejia, Sound Mixer: Guillermo Salazar
Six women share what it’s like to have a loved one killed with a firearm.
What Gun Violence Cost Them
BY LORENA O’NEIL
“I know that it’s easier and it feels better to think that this won’t happen to you, but the reality is that the likelihood is it will. We, as Americans, are not safe.”
“In the gun space, the ball is definitely in the influencer’s court.”
“People who don’t understand why guns are so appealing to women don’t understand how viscerally empowering it is for a woman to hold and fire a gun.”
“It is very easy to be encouraged to show parts of your body, present yourself a certain way for a certain outcome.”
Read more stories from our Women and Gun series.
Content warning: The following story contains references to gun violence.
Content warning: The following story contains references to gun violence.