Butina adapted her message to her audience and current events. As early as 2012, Guns.com ran a piece on her organization calling for more relaxed Russian gun laws after the Sandy Hook shooting. In her conversations with older men, she reportedly often joked about her hunting skills and mentioned she had modeled in photo shoots to promote gun rights, including a glamorous spread in Russian GQ. In an interview with Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich for Townhall.com, she expressed admiration for the NRA’s youth programs.
“Who is the average Russian gun owner and a member of The Right to Bear Arms today? A middle-class man with a family and a business — someone who has something to lose and to protect,” she told a group of University of South Dakota students in April 2015, before ending with a Bible verse, according to an outline of her presentation posted on social media.
In a video posted by the organizers of FreedomFest, a libertarian political event held in Las Vegas in July 2015, she suggested, with a slight grimace, that she wished to bring the US concept of freedom back home.
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