The members of Sons of Legion can tell when one of their anthemic songs hits the target. “Sometimes I can use my own music as a soundtrack for life,” says co-frontman Adam McInnis. “ And after we did ‘Power’ I felt that every time I heard the song, I could pick up a truck and throw it through a window.”

A viral sensation over the past year, the Nashville-based Sons of Legion have only been a duo for a few years, though McInnis and Mario “Daddy Jack” Marchetti had logged years as songwriters and producers. With a sound falling somewhere between Americana, r&b/gospel and arena rock, they bring their first-ever national tour to the Orpheum on Friday, Sept. 18.

“The show has everything from a big rock concert to intimate singer/songwriter moments,” McInnis promises.

If you haven’t heard them on the radio, it’s because the pair have effectively done an end run around the music industry. They don’t much care about selling albums — in fact they’ve given most of their music away online — but have gotten bigger success through licensing to Netflix and sports.

“The deeper I went into the music industry, the more I realized I didn’t like the people in it — I think the right word is insidious. Put it this way: If I was starting a pizza shop, I wouldn’t want to ask Papa John’s how good my pizza is — I’d want to give it to my friends and family, then they’d tell their friends and get their contact information, and we’d build a community around pizza. That’s how I feel about music; let’s not go through other people and take it right to the fans.”

Their most-streamed track so far is a rare cover version, “In the Air Tonight” — Imagine Phil Collins with a Southern accent and you’ll get the idea. McInnis says it came about largely because he was a teenage Genesis fan. “When you do a song that big you have to feel you can put your own energy into it, give it a new soul in a sense. We’ve also just done ‘Stand By Me,’ and we don’t write a lot of love songs ourselves. You have to choose a song that’s deep enough, and maybe vague enough, that a new vibration can live inside it. But you can’t be exact enough that people will say, ‘They’re just ripping off the original’.”

Titles like “Power” and “Firestarter” evince the anthemic nature of their songs, which has made Sons of Legion a natural fit for sports licensing, at the moment their single “Matrix” is being featured on ABC/ESPN’s weekly college football.

“I think our music has a good energy that makes people feel a shot of adrenaline. That particular song came out of being in Los Angeles and feeling the angst of people being stuck in traffic. So we said, ‘Let’s write a song that releases some of that energy.’

“When we’re writing songs we’re not thinking ‘This would fit on ‘Yellowstone’ or ‘This would go with football,’ but you can still feel something in the room. Without getting too spiritually deep about this, I feel we’re not just random people walking the earth, and there’s something inside us that gets depleted by materialism and by narcissism. So when we get into these modes of singing, I’m hoping it unlocks the part of the soul that says ‘Wait a minute, I’m really here for something’.”

Several members of the Boston Bruins were guests of the Red Sox at Fenway Park on Saturday.

Jeremy Swayman, Hampus Lindholm, Nikita Zadorov, Fraser Minten and many other players not only took in the sights and sounds of Fenway, but also got to hit some batting practice prior to the game.

And a couple of them showed they can produce with a bat in their hand as well as a stick.

Bruins forward Morgan Geekie hit a home run over the Green Monster wall while Tanner Jeannot wouldn’t be outdone, and hit two homers. Geekie also threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

Prior to the game, Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy was asked which of his players would be best on the ice. Tracy said he could see starting pitcher Payton Tolle in an enforce role. He definitely has the size for the job, standing at 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds.

“I can see Tolle putting somebody in the boards for sure,” Tracy said.

A reporter brought up Caleb Durbin as his gritty game might translate well to the ice. But Tracy thought his 5-foot-6 frame was a detriment to a hockey career.

“He’s a bit undersized, maybe,” Tracy said.

The Bruins went through captain’s practices this week and open up training camp Friday. They open up the season in just over two weeks on Sept. 29 against the New York Rangers at TD Garden.

Question 9 is a measure on November’s ballot that would repeal 2024 gun-safety legislation that strengthened the state’s red flag law, tightened licensing requirements, and required better tracking of ghost guns, among other changes. On their website, those who want to repeal the law say the measures make it too hard to exercise their Second Amendment rights, and that the red flag requirements “turn law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight,”

Back to the nursery.

The dispatcher is still on the line. Ma’am, are you still there?

There has been a struggle. The phone is on the floor. A man’s feet step over it.

“When seconds count, the police are minutes away. Vote no on ballot Question 9,” the voice-over says. “Your safety depends on it.”

It’s scary stuff. It’s also over-the-top. But whipping up fear, especially among women, is nothing new for the gun industry — or the Second Amendment absolutists who goose their profits by convincing gun owners that their rights are under attack, thereby also convincing them that they must absolutely buy more guns.

Here’s how their argument goes: If that terrified woman in the ad owned a gun, and had it close by when she was putting her baby to sleep, she could have used it to stop the intruder. Presumably, the only way to be truly safe, even in your own home, is to be strapped at all times.

There’s little to no reliable research suggesting that guns make their owners safer, however. After all, we have hundreds of millions of guns in this country, and our homicide rate absolutely crushes that of other high-income countries.

There is, however, plenty of research indicating that guns in the home make women far less safe. A person who lives in a home with a handgun faces a seven-times higher risk of being shot and killed by an intimate partner, according to a 2022 study.

“They’re really leveraging fear,” said Ruth Zakarin, chair of the Vote Yes on 9 campaign, which would retain the stronger gun-safety measures. “It’s not an accurate picture of what safety looks like.”

Zakarin, who has worked for decades to reduce domestic violence, knows first-hand how much more likely it is that that violence will become lethal when a gun is in the home. And owning a gun is associated with a way higher risk of suicide, particularly among women.

But look, setting all of that aside, there’s nothing in the 2024 gun safety measures that would prevent the poor woman in that ad from having a gun — unless she is under 21 and has her heart set on a semi automatic rifle, or she has been deemed by a judge to be at risk of hurting herself or others, or she refuses to meet the training requirements, or she wants to build herself an untraceable ghost gun.

In fact, according to the state’s new firearm data dashboard, there has been no dropoff in the number of people licensed to carry guns in Massachusetts since the new regulations were enacted.

“There is nothing in this legislation that disrupts a legal pathway to owning a gun,” Zakarin said. “We are still seeing people applying for licenses to carry and receiving them.”

And many of those people are women. In 2018, women made up less than a quarter of gun owners. Now they make up nearly a third, according to an analysis by Vital City, a policy journal. Here and across the country, the industry, long fueled by machismo, has also been marketing heavily to women, using fear as a selling point. That’s because there are already more guns than people in the United States, and the only way gun makers can keep making giant profits in a market this saturated is by targeting new customers.

But nobody should assume that the industry — and the gun rights activists who fuel it — are suddenly enlightened about the women whose safety now appears to be their top priority.

The campaign by the Civil Rights Coalition, the group organized to repeal the gun safety measures, features women heavily on social media, conflating gun rights with women’s rights. “Men are stronger than women,” reads one re-post on the campaign’s Facebook page, showing a woman holding a large weapon. “That’s why I carry. Self defense is a woman’s right.”

Last summer, the campaign welcomed Brandon Herrera to head a fund-raiser at Cape Gun Works, the Hyannis store owned by Toby Leary, who chairs the committee to repeal the law. Herrera, a gun rights activist and YouTuber with millions of followers, is now a Republican congressional candidate in Texas. He has a long history of saying ugly things about women, most of them unprintable here. In 2024, according to a CNN investigation, Herrera said the world’s population weighs about the same as “two dozen feminists.” He has called liberal women discussing guns “both fat and wrong,” and has used sexually explicit insults against gun safety advocate Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action. Herrera claims his despicable comments were just jokes.

Can’t women take a joke?

“Huge thanks to @realbrandonherrera for coming behind enemy lines to stand with us here in Massachusetts,” Leary wrote on Instagram after the Hyannis event.

Having Herrera at a fund-raiser doesn’t mean the campaign endorses his misogyny, said a spokesperson for the Civil Rights Coalition: “As a well-known activist for the Second Amendment rights, Brandon volunteered his time to speak at a fund-raiser on Constitutional rights. His comments outside of the Second Amendment issue are solely his responsibility and they are not something our organization would approve.”

That’s a relief.

Polling suggests the repeal effort is losing pretty badly so far. Still, the Globe has reported that the Civil Rights Coalition is hoping Massachusetts will be a model for those trying to undo gun safety laws in other states.

It would be nice if this state delivered a crushing defeat instead — with women leading the charge.

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.