Smith and Wesson Forced to Clarify It’s Not Advertising With the Proud Boys

Gun manufacturer Smith and Wesson is under fire for promoting a brand’s T-shirt that looks rather similar to one used by the Proud Boys.

On Monday morning, the Twitter accounts for Smith and Wesson and its suppressor company Gemtech sent out tweets featuring a man holding an assault-style rifle and wearing a black T-shirt with a yellow “PB” written on the front. Yellow on black is the color scheme for the Proud Boys.

The companies quickly received backlash for the tweet and deleted it before reposting with a caption clarifying that PB on the shirt stands for militaristic lifestyle brand “Perce|eption Brand,” not the Proud Boys, a far-right streetfighting gang that has been connected to myriad criminal activities including racist assaults and the Jan. 6 riot. 

The Perce|eption Brand website sells the T-shirt in question for $30. The back of the shirt features the slogan “support your local enforcer.” The brand is a typical “tacticool” outlet which sells T-shirts, hats, patches, and stickers. 

In the short time between the tweets, many seized upon the images to claim the gun manufacturer was promoting the Proud Boys and called on the company to apologize. Even after the company clarified, some remained steadfast that the shirt was a dog whistle to the Proud Boys because of the letters and shared color scheme.  

“I worry that some groups of people online are looking for evidence of an insurgent far-right as if they're in a Hardy Boys novel, and that arguing over a T-shirt like this distracts from the larger picture that's developed over the last couple of decades and the threats it is actively posing to the most vulnerable among us,” Jared Holt, the senior research manager for US hate and extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told VICE News. 

That said, he did acknowledge he “can understand the impulse and suspicion” but that it’s always important to wait.

"Right away I was skeptical that a global brand like Smith & Wesson would associate themselves with an extremist group, let alone one as widely known as the Proud Boys,” said Holt. “However you might feel about gun companies, at the end of the day that's just bad business for a company as large as they are. I couldn't imagine how that possibly would have made its way through corporate.”

Smith and Wesson and Perce|eption Brand did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

(Disclosure: Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys in 2016, was a co-founder of VICE in 1994. He left the company in 2008 and has had no involvement since then.)

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