Pigs' testicles. Joni Ernst has held them in her hands. And chopped them off. Won't you please consider voting for her to be the United States senator from Iowa?

Tom Harkin, the soft-spoken longtime Democratic senator from Iowa, is retiring—and there's a mad dash to replace him. The Dems have their nominee lined up, but there are currently five weirdos vying to be the Republican who loses to him.

Weirdest among these is the lady above, Joni Ernst. Don't get me wrong. She's got an impressive resumé! Colonel in the Army Reserve, state senator, has Mitt Romney's endorsement. But what she really wants you to know in her campaign ads is, she's an expert pig-nutter, and she revels in the squeals of her newly-gelded porcine torturees, and she hopes to do the same to persons unknown in Washington:

ERNST: I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm. So in Washington, I'll know how to cut pork...

[CUE B-ROLL OF PIGS, BUT LIKE CUTE PIGS, NOT THE SORT YOU REALLY WANT TO BRING UP WHEN YOU BRING UP HOG CASTRATION, WITH SQUEAL SOUNDS DUBBED IN, SAY SOMETHING ABOUT REPEALING OBAMACARE ETC.]

ERNST: Washington's full of big spenders. Let's make 'em squeal!

Yessiree, she's just your average folksy war-fightin' blade-usin' mom-type lady. There is an Iowan charm to this! Or so we media mavens on the coasts are supposed to believe, whilst we dutifully viralize Ernst's swine-semen sales pitch.

Pity Ernst for feeling the need to run a campaign like this. With a dossier like hers, she may be a hard-nosed policy expert. But who cares, because:

1) SHE CUTS HAM GONADS OFF HERSELF,

and

2) She's down almost double digits to Harkin's anointed Democratic successor, as are most of the GOP hopefuls. While she's cutting balls off pigs, she should probably gather some goat entrails and incense for her sacrifice to Baal, too. That's likely to give her a bigger bump in the polls than talking about the time she sliced off Wilbur's useless marbles.

(h/t Michael Scherer)

Because it is impossible to fully enjoy your wedding until as many people as possible are enviously following it on Twitter, you can now pay $3,000 to rent a "social media wedding concierge." This expert will pick a bespoke hashtag, get your wedding guests to use it, and make sure photos are posted on Instagram. (So, basically what Vogue did for Kimye.)

W Hotels sent out an email promoting the service at its four New York locations and encouraging couples to "say goodbye to shameless wedding selfies"—by trading them in for shamefully expensive (but always properly hashtagged!) ones.

The package also includes a social media recap, so you can always remember exactly what your friends were doing on their phones during your special day.

The concierge will even help you plan your honeymoon on Pinterest—a honeymoon you can definitely afford after spending $3,000 on a hashtag.

[H/T: Bianca Bosker, Photo Credit: Shutterstock]

Today is the 72nd birthday of living legend/national treasure/Diva Star Grand Supreme Aretha Franklin. She celebrated this weekend at a star-studded party at New York's Ritz Carlton alongside the trusted companion that is her purse.

Franklin, owner of the greatest voice of all time, civil rights activist, and perhaps the person most responsible for bridging the gap from gospel to pop with her standard-setting vocal style, posed with her purse...

[Photo via AP]

...had cake with her purse...

[Photo via AP]

...and took a group photo with label boss Clive Davis and her purse.

[Photo via AP]

Aretha Franklin, generally, is carrying her purse when you see her. This occurs both offstage...

...and on.

Aretha Franklin's purse is something of a thing, even. As multiple reviews have pointed out, her concerts often begin with a well dressed man carrying her purse out and placing it onstage before she comes out.

From a write-up of her 2007 show at San Antonio's Majestic Theater:

A few minutes before downbeat, as ushers were still leading hundreds of late arrivals to their seat, as the people in the front rows were up and milling about greeting each other and as bartenders were filling dozens of drink orders, a tall, nattily dressed man carrying a beige and brown purse walked onstage, put the purse under the piano and walked off.

From a review of her 2011 show at the Mystic Lake Casino in Prior Lake, MN:

As her massive (and partially Minnesotan) backing band assembled themselves on stage, a well-dressed man who was presumably the Queen of Soul's handler scurried out on stage to place a tiger-striped handbag beneath the lip of the concert grand piano at the center of the stage, a sign that Ms. Franklin herself would soon appear.

So, what's up with the purse? Franklin has answered this question. In 2008, she told the Washington Post:

It's like Peanuts, right? My security blanket. No, I just choose to keep it with me. Ladies always keep up with their purses!

Well, not quite. In any given group, if anyone has a purse, it's going to be Aretha Franklin.

Maybe the implication is that other heifers (to use Patti LaBelle's word ) aren't ladies and thus aren't keeping up with their purses. Maybe everyone else has hired someone else to handle their purses. Regardless, Aretha Franklin shows up at many a red carpet and public appearance lugging a giant bag with her. It is her signature. It is her calling card. It is part of what makes her her. It is her way of not giving a fuck and doing Aretha. She has earned the right to carry whatever goddamn thing she wants. Or not, even:

And so, on this special day, we speak your names, Aretha Franklin and Aretha Franklin's purse. Please enjoy the following pictures of Aretha Franklin and her purse.

[Photo via AP]

[Photo via AP]

[Photo via WENN.com]

[Photo via WENN.com]

(In case you're wondering what's going on with the hat as it bleeds into the background...

...here is a better shot, as Franklin considers another option.)

[Photo via WENN.com]

(That isn't a purse, but it is big enough to be one.)

Look, the fact of the matter is that if Aretha Franklin can have someone carry her umbrella...

...she can have someone carrying her purse, and she just isn't. The purse is part of her.

Except for that one time.

[Photo via WENN.com]

The man holding her purse above is her longtime friend, Willie Wilkerson, to whom Franklin was engaged in 2012. A few weeks later, she called off the engagement.

Happy birthday, Aretha Franklin and Aretha Franklin's purse!

[All images via Getty unless noted otherwise directly below]

Edward Snowden's disclosures may have helped the Russians conceal their moves in Crimea, unnamed U.S. officials subtly suggest without evidence. But "I think it's good for Americans to know the kinds of things that have been revealed by him," says Jimmy Carter. Get on the same page, fellas!

A Florida family armed with baseball bats trapped a burglar in their bathroom Saturday night, after catching him attempting to steal laundry, towels, and a little girl's panties.

The Gonzalez family was awakened by "a big boom sound" coming from downstairs, so they grabbed their bats and headed down to investigate. Their screen door was broken, and some of their belongings, including a laundry basket, some towels, and detergent were stacked outside near a bicycle.

Golden Gate Police showed up to investigate, but neither the family nor deputies found anyone in the house.

"We were all in the living room and we heard a noise. That's when we realized, has someone checked the bathroom?" Janet Gonzalez told local news station WVZN.

Cracking open the door, she saw the suspect, 21-year-old Manuel Rodriguez. The rest of the family held the door closed while Gonzalez went outside to tell the deputies. They arrested Rodriguez for burglary and petty theft.

"He had my little girl's panties in his pockets and one on the sink," said Gonzalez. "To me only a sick, perverted person would do that."

[H/T: UPI, Photo: Golden Gate Estates Police]

The Danish zoo that caused a worldwide outcry by killing and publicly dissecting Marius the Giraffe announced it has euthanized four lions: Two adults and their two cubs.

The Copenhagen Zoo says the lion family was put down Monday to make way for a new male who posed a danger to the cubs.

"Because of the pride of lions' natural structure and behavior, the zoo has had to euthanize the two old lions and two young lions who were not old enough to fend for themselves," the zoo said in a statement.

The zoo claimed the new male would have killed the 10-month-old cubs "as soon as he got the chance."

The new lion will arrive within the next few days. The zoo says it made a failed attempt to find new homes for the lion family before bringing him in to start a new pride as part of its lion breeding program.

The Copenhagen Zoo is infamous for killing Marius, a young giraffe, with a bolt gun, and then dissecting his body and feeding him to lions while visitors watched. Marius wasn't allowed to reach adulthood because of European zoo rules on giraffe interbreeding, the zoo said.

"Marius hasn't made us the least bit afraid, because what we are doing is the most correct thing to do," zoo chief Steffen Stræde said.

The lion family's bodies won't be cut up in public, because "not all our animals are dissected in front of an audience," a zoo spokesman said.

[Photo: AP Images]

Call of the Wildman is a popular show about a wild-critter trapper on Animal Planet. It's also totally fake, with animals trucked-in and treated brutally. And Mother Jones, the magazine that first exposed Wildman's dark side, has new photo evidence that it screwed with some poor caged coyote for ratings.

The picture above, obtained by MJ from an inside source, shows a coyote that apparently lived in the wild until it was trapped by a paid handler for use on the show... and confined in a too-small cage trap, and left to get sick, until the show producers decided it was too sick to use on camera as a "wild coyote," at which point they had another "wild" coyote flown in from across the country, probably illegally. Reporter James West summarizes his findings:

• A photo obtained by Mother Jones from a person who worked on the production shows a coyote that was captured at the request of producers and held in a cramped trap for an unknown period of time prior to filming on location in Kentucky, according to the person who provided the photo. By the time of the shoot, according to two people who worked on the production, the coyote was "sick and unresponsive" and had to be replaced.
• According to internal production documents and communications obtained by Mother Jones, the show quickly brought in a replacement coyote for the shoot from Ohio. Kentucky law, with rare exception, forbids the importation of coyotes.
• According to internal documents and data analysis of the photo, the sick coyote had been held captive for more than three days after it was trapped by a licensed nuisance wildlife control operator working for the show. Without a specific permit—which the NWCO working for the show did not have—Kentucky regulations forbid holding captured wildlife for more than 48 hours.
• Mother Jones has also obtained government documents showing that state wildlife regulators began warning the show's star about violations in March 2012—more than a year before Sharp Entertainment, the producer of the show, says that it first became aware of complaints about animal mistreatment in connection with Call of the Wildman.

This sort of business is nothing new for Wildman , the allegedly real adventures of Ernie "Turtleman" Brown Jr., who is depicted on the show as a colorful redneck who rids beleaguered homeowners and small-biz owners of their feral invasive problem animals. But as West's seven-month investigation has shown, the TV show's scenarios are staged events in which the "wild" animals are dumped by producers into the shot for maximum dramatic effect—and with little regard for the wellbeing of the raccoons, wallabies, bats, zebras, and now coyotes they use.

West's latest investigation showed pretty conclusively that the coyote above had been caged for three days before anyone from the show even bothered to give him a look:

According to the person who provided the photo, the coyote was captured by a NWCO at the request of the show and "was transported for hours in cramped conditions." Where the coyote was then held and under what conditions could not be confirmed, but as the May 10 film shoot approached the coyote was weak and limping, the source said. It would be brought to the filming location anyway. "That bit sickens me," the source said. A second person who worked on the production confirmed that the coyote was sluggish and unresponsive as the film shoot approached. "The animal was just sitting there, so they had to get another coyote fairly quickly," that second source said.

Further investigation suggests that the trapper of this animal, and the other ones paid for trapping by the show, are licensed "nuisance wildlife control operators." But NCWOs are supposed to log their catches in with the state that licenses them—and according to Kentucky records, "the NWCO working for the show did not report the capture of a coyote during a nuisance call on or around that date."

That would seem to contradict what the show studio's vice president told West: "On the day in question you bring up, a licensed NWCO officer arrived to a location with a coyote he had caught after receiving a nuisance call, and when he brought it to us, the licensed NWCO officers on set moved it from the smaller cage it was caught in to an appropriately sized cage."

Shown a picture of the coyote, a wildlife ecology professor told the magazine that he probably didn't get inside that cage of its own accord, adding: "I would only use a cage this size for transportation or holding purposes as a last resort."

Full photo is below; a trapped possum in the same size cage is visible in the background:

[Photos via Mother Jones]

"I don't push labels on my kids," says a mom whose six-year-old daughter recently acquired a $695 dress. "Jolie chooses what she wants in a store in an organic way."

The dreams of those agorist Bitcoiners who still hoped that their digital currency could evade the taxman are finally dead. The IRS hath spoken. They will treat Bitcoins as property, which means self-employment and capital gains taxes may apply to your stash. Call an accountant for further details, folks.

Dylan Smith co-founded Box, a storage company that's posed to be Silicon Valley's newest public company. Smith will make tens of millions of dollars (at least!)—perhaps enough money to erase his cringe-attack reality show moment from the internet.

In 2010, baby-faced Smith, originally created in the same laboratory as Mark Zuckerberg, was looking for love. Tinder hadn't yet been invented, so he of course turned to Bravo for a slot on Millionaire Matchmaker, a popular TV morality play wherein awful people are arranged to proposition each other for sex. At least he gets a kiss in the end.

This will either remain a lifelong embarrassment for Smith, or Bravo stardom will be considered the next prerequisite for startup success after being white, young, male, and uncomfortable around others.

When Kanye West runs out to pick up some Burger King for Kim Kardashian, he does it big. The rapper is reportedly planning to buy his fiancée a 10-piece order of European Burger King franchises to celebrate their wedding .

Yeezy is already in the burger game, as the owner of several Chicago Fatburger locations. A source tells the Star that Mr. West thinks international Burger King locations are a perfect fit for Kim. The 10 stores he's eyeing are spread across the U.K., Italy, and France.

"That's where he sees her future career, away from reality TV," the source added.

Away from reality TV?! But Kim Kardashian: Burger Queen is money in the bank!

[H/T: Brobible, Photo: Getty Images]

Pro tip: If you want to keep a Hispanic billionaire as the top fundraiser of your embattled Republican gubernatorial re-election campaign in heavily Hispanic Florida, try to keep your gringo staffers from cracking jokes in fake Mexican accents on a ride to Chipotle.

Shep Smith has a photo of me on his phone.

On Thursday night around 9 p.m., the Fox News anchor and I stepped out onto East 27th Street, outside the Prince George Ballroom, where the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association was throwing its annual silent auction.

After wishing me a good evening, but before slamming the door of the black SUV that was waiting for him, the Fox News anchor took out his cell phone and snapped my portrait. I still haven’t quite figured out why.

“He’s not here to make a statement.”

Two hours earlier, when I first entered the silent auction, Smith’s attendance was a charged topic of conversation. Was the anchor, as several gay outlets wondered, intending to come out?

“He’s not here to make a statement,” a prominent CNN anchor told me soon after I arrived. “He’s been invited a million times, and this is the first time he’s accepted their invitation.”

(From all appearances, he cut short his trip to Crimea, where he was covering the Russian occupation, in order to attend.)

Another guest (who asked not to be named) revealed that Fox News had assigned Smith two minders, one of whom I later identified as top Fox spokeswoman Dana Klinghoffer, who followed Smith along the perimeter of the ballroom to filter people who approached him. A third Fox employee, a producer at Shepard Smith Reporting named Christopher DiLella, paced the room to suss out any potential threats (i.e., reporters).

(Smith’s longtime boyfriend, Gio Graziano, was not in attendance.)

Nobody else at the event, including other anchors of Smith's stature, had brought along their employer's P.R. team. Only Fox News seemed to be extremely concerned about guarding Smith’s public appearances.

“Good luck approaching him!” the guest warned.

“It was nice to meet you”

As the night (and my chances of getting a word with Smith) wound down, I stationed myself on a bench outside the ballroom’s exit, in a long hallway leading to the building’s glass entrance.

About ten minutes later, Smith came walking out, at which moment I stood up and, after identifying myself as a reporter at Gawker, asked if he minded answering some of my questions. Smith looked ahead, completely silent. I pressed: “Are you not answering questions?”

Suddenly, from somewhere behind us, a tall man in a black suit—this was Smith’s third minder, Christopher DiLella—ran up and shoved me away from Smith. When I turned around and indicated my confusion, however, he immediately backed away.

“It’s nice to meet you, Keenan,” Smith said when I caught up with him near the building’s first set of glass doors.

“You, too,” I said. “I’m just trying to ask if you’re actually acknowledging that you’re gay.” Smith laughed without opening his mouth. Earlier that night, he walked away from a Washington Blade reporter who asked him a similar question.

“Have a good evening, Keenan,” Smith said as he opened the door to the SUV that was waiting for him. The anchor then withdrew a black iPhone 5, held it up to the space between us, and took my picture.

I waved.

“Why are you here? Why are you here?”

Back inside, I looked for the event’s organizer, a CNN producer named Javi Morgado, mostly because he hadn’t returned any of my prior emails about the event. He was talking with DiLella—the guy who shoved me away from Smith—and was visibly angry.

“Why are you here? Why are you here? Did you even buy a ticket to this event?” Morgado inveighed as DiLella walked away. “Shep was very upset when he left,” he continued, “because you were accosting him.”

Morgado, whose network recently floated the theory that the missing Malaysian Airlines plane disappeared into a black hole, went on to describe Gawker as “a rag” and said that “I don’t answer emails from people like you.”

After showing him my ticket, which cost $100, Morgado led me out of the ballroom, and on the way alerted a large security guard to my intrusion. “Please make sure this man does not come in again,” he told the guard, who followed the two of us out the door.

At the check-in booth, Morgado refunded my ticket with five $20 bills. To the man and woman who were sitting at the booth, he said: “He accosted a guest while he was leaving. He accosted him.” To me, he added: “I do not want people like you at my event, people like you who accost others.”

(I interpreted this as an extremely veiled allusion to Smith flaying a waitress for being too slow, and/or his 2000 arrest for mowing down another reporter with his car.)

Fox News and the N.L.G.J.A.

As I saw myself out, and found a subway headed downtown, the night’s events began to make a bit more sense. Morgado, like pretty much every other guest that night, was hugely supportive, and clearly defensive, of Smith. The anchor received the loudest applause, by a large margin, when hostess Amy Robach of ABC News announced his name. He even agreed to a selfie with Don Lemon, Thomas Roberts, and Ronan Farrow. That’s why Smith’s aggressive minders seemed so out of place. Even among this crowd, Smith, and Fox, felt uncomfortable.

Then again, the N.L.G.J.A.’s support of Smith and Fox isn’t exactly pure. Fox News has repeatedly donated thousands of dollars to the association, and agreed, as in years past, to be a Silver Sponsor of Thursday’s event. In turn, the association has never publicly criticized, or even pondered, Fox News’s frequently absurd coverage of gay people (whom anchor Bill O’Reilly recently accused of corrupting the Girl Scouts with “homosexual overtones”).

And it was Fox’s support that helped pay for Thursday’s glorious event space: A giant Manhattan ballroom gilded in gold and burgundy, where guests bid on prizes like a tour of Morning Joe (Retail Value: Priceless!) while downing bottles of Heineken (a Gold sponsor) and cocktails mixed with Voli vodka (a Diamond sponsor). And while Fox wasn’t the biggest sponsor, it was, being owned by Rupert Murdoch, one of the most powerful, and among the few capable of shaping—or destroying—the association’s own reputation.

Indeed, everything except Smith taking my picture—to show to whom?—seemed to make sense, once you identified the balance of money and influence.

None of this, of course, should detract from the fact that the N.L.G.J.A. throws a great party. Everyone—Shepard Smith Smith especially—seemed to be having a good time.

To contact the author of this post, email trotter@gawker.com

[Photos via Getty and Shutterstock]

Last week, the community behind the silly/hilarious/very real cryptocurrency Dogecoin noticed that NASCAR racer Josh Wise was without a sponsor. They needed to raise $55,000 in dogecoins, and Josh would have a ticket to ride. In less than a week, they've done it. You're about to see a Doge race around 'Dega.

Josh's no. 98 Ford (unfortunately, not a Doge Dodge) will hit the track in its brand-spanking new Very NASCAR livery on May 4th at the Aaron's 499 at the Talladega Superspeedway, according to SBNation. And it doesn't get that much bigger than Talladega, as it's the longest track in all of NASCAR.

We don't know what the official sponsor wrap will look like, but a design competition is underway on the official dogecoin subreddit.

In true Doge fashion, the effort to raise money was always 100% totally professional. And by "100% truly professional," I mean that one guy accidentally donated 20,000,000 dogecoins by accident, instead of only 2,000,000. Seriously, dude had a case of fat fingers, leading him to donate just over $15,000 instead of $1500.

He seems to be taking it all in stride though, especially considering how his company operates a Dogecoin exchange.

It's not like this is all the case of a mistaken donation, either. There were over 1,200 separate donations averaging out at $41 each, according to Ben Doernberg, one of the subreddit's moderators and a Dogecoin Foundation member.

Josh Wise himself looks pretty pumped on Twitter, and to reward the community he's doing an AMA on reddit tomorrow at 9 PM eastern.

First dogecoin funds the Jamaican bobsled team , and now their very own NASCAR racer. We may just be dealing with the next big thing in sports sponsorship, just as it's growing up . Too bad, Nike.

Wow.

Sweden. It's all fucking Sweden's fault.

You know who still smokes a lot of cigarettes? Poor people. While yuppies are quitting and taking up Pilates and Zumba, the poors just keep puffing away. It's sad. Policy makers are vexed. What other, healthier habits could the very poor pick up?

- Sitting

- Drinking

- Staring hollow-eyed at the wall and contemplating the intractability of poverty.

And those are just off the top of our head. Make better choices, poor people.

[Photo: Flickr]

A girl, 9, shaves her head in solidarity with a friend who's in chemo, and she gets suspended from school. Another girl, 8, wears t-shirts, jeans and sneakers, and she gets suspended, too. Their institutions have different reasons, but the result is the same: bullshit expectations put on little girls.

Both cases came to light this week, the first at a charter school in Colorado, the second at a Christian academy in Virginia. Elementary schoolgirls, doing elementary schoolgirl things: their own things. Shame on them!

The Colorado girl, identified as Kamryn, "shaved her head in support of her friend, 11-year-old Delaney, who is battling neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer, and recently started chemotherapy," according to Fox News. But she was barred from class Monday morning at Caprock Academy because her sheer scalp violated the school's dress code:

Catherine Norton Breman, president and Chair of the academy's board of directors, said the dress code "was created to promote safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school's students. Under this policy, shaved heads are not permitted."

I may be biased here, but that's crap. After a minor media fuss, Kamryn was allowed back into school today, and officials of the charter school are expected to review its dress code policy this week.

Even more ire-raising is the case of Sunnie Kahle, the little girl in the video above "with short hair and a huge heart" being raised by her grandparents. But Sunni's appearance was not traditionally feminine enough for her principal at Timberlake Christian School, according to WSET-TV. The school sent her home with a stern letter:

The letter goes on to say that students have been confused about whether Sunnie is a boy or girl and specifies that administrators can refuse enrollment for condoning sexual immorality, practicing a homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity.

The letter goes on to reference specific Bible verses that affirm these beliefs.

The letter reads in part, "We believe that unless Sunnie as well as her family clearly understand that God has made her female and her dress and behavior need to follow suit with her God-ordained identity, that TCS is not the best place for her future education."

Sunnie is now in public school.

"How do you tell a child when she wants to wear pants a shirt, and go out and play in the mud and so forth, how do you tell her, no you can't, you've got to wear a pink bow in your hair, and you've got to let your hair grow out long, how do you do that?" Sunnie's grandmother asks.

The answer is that you don't. Or shouldn't.

You'll say there are obvious differences in these cases—a charter school and a Christian school. One that rethinks the wisdom of its policies when confronted with a hard case, and one that doubles down. But they're both indicative of a certain kind of social and cultural fragmentation, of a pulling inward into one's microcommunity, of defining that community by who disrupts it or threatens it.

Both of these schools are being stupid. Their rules may be rooted in honorable intentions to set boundaries for classroom conduct. But their rules are out of control. Little girls (and boys) shouldn't have to conform to any arbitrary standards of little-girl-little-boy appearance.

But no one can force these schools to stop being stupid, because America freedom something something.

We're extremely pleased to announce the hiring of a new Gawker columnist, a dog, who will maintain a blog at dog.gawker.com. Please enjoy a dog's first column, "Hey."

"The truck's load of corndogs spilled all over the roadway" is a sentence that actually appeared in news reports today, thanks to a driver who flipped his semi truck near Shreveport, La. early this morning.

The corndog-encrusted portion of I-220 west was shut down from 3:40 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. while crews cleaned up the delicious, fattening mess.

No one was hurt in the accident, and the driver won't be cited, which means you don't have to feel guilty imagining a U.S. transportation infrastructure made entirely out of corn-wrapped sausage product.

Just a little sick.

[H/T: WBRZ, Photo Credits: WFAB/Twitter, WBRZ]

Hollywood's elite might be gun-hating liberals, but the gun companies don't care. Thanks to the film industry, they're too busy shooting shit and exercising the best amendment of them all: getting rich as fuck.

According to Hollie McKay at Fox News, gun companies are paying big money for product placement in feature films. Brand-in Entertainment boasts on its website that they've successfully integrated Beretta into last summer's Lone Survivor and the Fox report confirms that "Beretta paid $250,000 for the prominent placement" in the film.

While no gun manufacturers would speak on the record about the role Hollywood plays in their sales, Brian Graves, owner of a firearms store in Colorado, confirmed movies influence gun trends:

"Movies sell guns. When a TV show is aired or a movie comes out, everyone wants to say, 'Well, punk, do you feel lucky?' Remember that Clint Eastwood did Westerns, and those firearms sell big time today. Each and every time a new movie comes out and the 'hero' uses his trusty firearm, it gets looked at and talked about."

One of the most famous guns impacted by Hollywood is the Glock handgun, whose sales spiked after being featured in the 1990 film Die Hard 2. Wesley Morris, a "schoolteacher by day and owner of the California-based gun store Ten Percent Firearms by night," explains that Glocks weren't even popular before Die Hard 2. Not anymore! Now all the cool tv shows and movies want Glocks:

According to reports, this branding was pure luck for Glock, as its inclusion was due to the movie's prop master. Now the Glock is one of the most featured in the industry. It was recently used in season nine of "Criminal Minds," as B.A.U. Chief SSA Aaron Hotchner draws his Glock 17. It was front and center again in last year's summer blockbuster "White House Down" and in hit films like "Kick Ass" and "The Bourne Ultimatum," as well as being a mainstay in the likes of "24" and "Prison Break."

While some filmmakers insist on using firearms experts as opposed to "contractual marketing protocol" in their work, it probably doesn't make much of a difference because the report ends by stating that, for gun manufacturers, "any publicity is good publicity."

[Image via AP]