Analyses indicated that most gun advertisements focus on the unique technology of the product, emphasizing technological advances to encourage consumers to purchase the product either as a first gun or to expand or improve their existing firearms collection. Manufacturers often use multiple themes and messages to target a broad base of consumers or to position their products to a particular subset of gun buyers. Manufacturers did not generally focus on fear or self-defense in their magazine advertisements but rather positioned firearms as a part of a particular lifestyle, be it hunting, shooting sports, or a military or western lifestyle. Such framing of the issue sidesteps discussion of injury risks in that the product is rarely depicted as a lethal weapon. Findings showed that 63 manufacturers placed a total of 185 advertisements; 72 of the advertisements were duplicates. Of the 113 unique advertisements, 76 appeared only once in the population of magazines and 37 advertisements appeared multiple times. The multiple ads constituted more than one half (57.8 percent) of the total advertisements. The most common overall and text theme was attributes of the gun (91.2 percent for overall; 96.5 percent for text). A distant second was hunting/outdoors (20.4 percent for overall, 15 percent for text) followed by patriotism (15.0 percent for overall, 11.5 percent for text) Class was the fourth most common overall theme (8.0 percent), whereas testimonial ranked fourth for text theme (8.0 percent). Self-protection tied for ninth most common overall (2.7 percent) and text theme (3.5 percent). The most recent issues of each of the 27 identified gun magazines were obtained; advertisements by firearms manufacturers were analyzed to assess themes and estimate the costs of the advertisements. Tables, references