Firearms Instructor Gives Unique Gun Control Message In Viral Video
A firearms instructor’s gun control “experiment” has gone viral on social media. The four-minute video by Mike Brown, who says he’s also a former adjunct criminal justice professor, has been viewed more than nine million times on Facebook and shared nearly 200,000 times.
In the footage embedded below, “Instructor Mike” implied that he was conducting the experiment in response to the calls for gun control that immediately followed the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1. Similar proposals accompany all such ghastly mass attacks, which often become politicized.
As portrayed in the video below, Brown puts live ammo in three legal weapons, a Sig Sauer MPX, a Smith & Wesson “Bodyguard”.38 special, and a 9mm Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol, and lays them on the table, facing in a safe direction. He then waits to see what happens, which, of course, is nothing.
He then shouts at the guns as if he is a drill instructor, followed by what he describes as a more humoristic approach, whispering to the guns, to see if they will activate on their own.
Following this demonstration, Brown gets into his message about gun control.
“Maybe, given that criminal justice is a part of a social science, maybe guns in and of themselves don’t kill people. Even if you fully load them up, they just don’t just start killing people. Maybe it’s the dumb-a** that people we need to worry about who have the firearms in their possession…Stop attacking tools; start focusing on people.”
In a discussion about additional gun control measures on CBS Face the Nation such as banning bump stocks, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, acknowledged that the Las Vegas shooter passed all the required background checks several times to purchase weapons and that no law would have stopped him, the Daily Caller reported. Stephen Paddock also used bump stocks in the attack, according to law enforcement authorities.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun control advocacy group, is suing the manufacturers and sellers of bump stocks on behalf of victims of the October 1 attack, AP reports. In 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) determined that it could not regulate bump stocks because the devices weren’t weapons, but that might change under pressure from Congress.
Watch the tongue-in-cheek video from firearms instructor Mike Brown and draw your own conclusions.
Do you agree or disagree that the legal focus should be on dangerous people rather than pistols, as gun rights advocates traditionally maintain? Do you think that it is likely that additional federal gun control laws or regulations will go on the books now?
[Featured Image by bunyarit/Shutterstock]
