this is fascinating about how gun culture (including the NRA & manufacturers) changed from the 1990's on to pander to those that gun culture originally made fun of as "couch commandos" and "tactards":

What Happened to Gun Culture

During the past three decades, it became one of the most dangerous elements of the right. How much of that can be blamed on the N.R.A.?

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells @ NewYorker.com, Nov. 16

[....] A second book about the N.R.A.’s world was published this month, “Gunfight,” by a gun-industry insider named Ryan Busse. His is a memoir of disenchantment. Having grown up hunting as a ranch kid in northwestern Kansas, Busse went to work in the nineteen-nineties for the sales department of a small gun manufacturer named Kimber, which had, in his view, a magnificent product line. As the company grew, so did Busse’s reputation as a gunrunner (his own term), until he was a two-time finalist at N.R.A. conventions as the industry’s Person of the Year and friends with governors, senators, and some of the most senior N.R.A. figures in Washington. Slowly he came to distrust this world, then to fear it, and eventually quit the gun industry, in 2018, having seen the politics that he’d watched develop at industry conventions culminate in Trumpism. The story that Busse tells is not just of the gun industry’s long political turn, in which a rural coalition of rifle owners became a partisan voting bloc, but also of the cultural change that the N.R.A. coaxed along, of the militarization of the gun world. He describes how a lobbying group took a political base of hunters and nurtured a new, expanded audience of gun guys [....]

I'd throw in that this thought: coincides with gangsta rap world that also glorified firepower becoming monetarily successful...?