YouTube's New Policy on Gun Videos

The New York Times recently ran a story about YouTube changing its policy about allowing videos

pertaining to "the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories, specifically items like ammunition, gatling triggers, and drop-in auto sears". According to YouTube, the new policy will go into effect in April 2018.

As announced in October 2017,  YouTube had already made clear its plan to take down "video tutorials" about how to make guns fire bullets more rapidly via the use of a bump stock device. That decision was in response to a mass shooting that month in Las Vegas, wherein the shooter used a bump stock to rapidly spray bullets and take lives.  

The policy is not entirely new, but more of an expansion on YouTube's existing policy about dangerous or harmful content. In my book, Guns on the Internet,  forthcoming from Routledge/Taylor & Francis in August 2018, I include a chapter on YouTube gun videos. 

(I found videos using search terms like "bumpfire" and "bump stock", among others.) My specific interest in writing this chapter was whether gun-related video content should be protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, using standards such as those established through prior court cases. In other words, to what extent does the gun-related content of a video constitute political speech, or contribute to the marketplace of ideas? In a way, YouTube gun videos represent an intersection of sorts of the First and Second Amendments, with the caveat that YouTube is not a government entity and can enforce standards that are much more restrictive than Constitutional free speech standards. 

Source: http://blog.k-var.com/news/nssf-youtubes-policy-causes-concern/

Will the new policy mainly affect commercial operations like GlockStore, or will individuals -- gun owner YouTubers -- be impacted as well? On the blog of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the new policy is, unsurprisingly, decried as "censorship". 

My guess would be that the policy will not be uniformly enforced. Will YouTube staff do searches on words like "bumpfire" and "bumpfiring" and remove each and every video with those words in the tagline? That might be in the tens of thousands of videos. They could do this, but then YouTubers may simply switch to other synonyms (e.g., "rapid fire shooting with __________" [fill in name of gun]).

Time will tell how much of an impact YouTube's new policy will make. 

Florida's New Gun Control Law

As many folks know, this month the Florida legislature passed, and Governor Rick Scott signed, a new gun control law in response to a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Image source: www.thestreet.com/story/14488770/1/

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The new law establishes a waiting period of 3 days, or until a background check is conducted, with some exceptions (e.g., police officers, members of the military). It also raised the minimum age for buying a gun to 21 years old (up from 18 years); included provisions to allow school personnel to be armed; and banned bumpstock, even though no bumpstocks were used in the Parkland shooting. Bumpstock was used a few months earlier in a Las Vegas mass shooting. (For the record, a gun owner doesn't need a bumpstock to bump-fire, but that's another conversation.)

As the New York Times and other news outlets made clear, Florida's new law didn't cover other areas, such as banning specific types of guns (e.g., AR-15s), strengthening background checks, or banning so-called "high capacity" magazines that can hold upwards of 100 bullets. Gun owners will often complain that bans of magazines that hold a certain (high) number of bullets won't do much good, due to shooters simply being able to quickly reload -- as is shown here and here. Some of these points are outlined in this video by Colion Noir. The new law also didn't touch the issue of guns being left in and subsequently stolen from cars. 

Shortly after the new law went into effect, the National Rifle Association filed a lawsuit to stop it. 

Will the new law be effective? Will it prevent future shootings and keep schools safer? As Pam Bondi of Florida's Office of the Attorney General wrote in a statement, the bill is "not perfect, and sadly it will not bring back the 17 lives lost in the horrific school shooting, but the safety of our children is not a political issue - it's simply the right thing to do."

Time will tell.