(pictured above: Fugger Lump Hammers celebrity endorsement, 'If A Job’s Worth Doing. . .')
I’ve recently gotten involved in the arms trade. Let’s face it, people are always going to fight and if I don’t sell them weapons someone else will so it may as well be me. Now I realise I can’t compete with the like of BAE Systems or anything so I’m not exactly selling self-propelled artillery to developing nations or any of that. No. I’m much more small scale. I sell things like knuckle dusters and slash hooks to warring Traveller clans.
I don’t feel bad about it. If the warring parties didn’t use my weapons they’d just be bashing each other’s heads in with rocks or something. At least this way someone (i.e. me) gets to profit and jobs are created and, in these difficult times, that’s good for the economy as a whole.
There were journos complaining about me in the local papers though. They were going on about some kid who got shot full of pellets as she crossed a halting site and lost an eye and blah blah blah. They traced the pellets back to my company and started filling their pages with fuzzy pictures of me looking sinister, getting in and out of cars and going to the shops with my hood up.
I realised I had to put a stop to all this bad press so a subsidiary company I own (one that sells lump hammers) bought a significant amount of advertising space in their rags. They don’t like to bite the hand that feeds, the old hacks. Then I sent out a press release saying I’d donated some money to a traveller resource centre. In truth, none of the resource centres would take my money so I had to set up my own. No one used my resource centre and it didn’t even strictly exist but it’s the thought that counts. Anyway, next thing I knew, the papers were portraying me as a ‘philanthropic lump hammer entrepreneur’ and said my resource centre would ‘herald a new spring for the Traveller community’. They didn’t even mention the weapons side of the business. Nice one.
The Internet is a bit harder to control though. Bloody activists were all over it calling me a hypocrite because I make donations with one hand whilst profiting from misery with the other. Well, I hired a PR company to flood the forums with the following counter-argument: These people are going to kill each other anyway and at least some of the profits made from arming them goes toward their resource centre. When people argued back, the PR people pulled a masterstroke. They started referring to those who opposed the arms sales as ‘anti-resource centre’. I thought that was bloody genius. That PR company was money well spent.
Do you need anything yourself? How about a lump hammer? They get the job done. They’re duel purpose actually.
