A lawsuit backed by the legal arm of the gun control group Everytown that claims gunmaker Smith & Wesson and two other companies are liable for the mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois has now drawn in popular GunTuber and attorney James Reeves, who says he's now been subpoenaed with demands for "years of info and analytics" about any of his videos involving Smith & Wesson products.
I was just subpoenaed in an anti-gun lawsuit...for being a guntuber. Link to the lawsuit is below. The case is Roberts v. Smith & Wesson, and it's the same playbook, almost copy+paste, of the Soto v. Bushmaster "Sandy Hook" lawsuit against Remington, which put them out of…
— James Reeves (@jjreeves) September 14, 2026
Reeves notes that there's something in the subpoena that should concern other online content creators operating in the Second Amendment space:
The part that should concern my fellow gun reviewers: Their subpoena defines an "Advertisement" to include even unpaid organic social-media content. In other words, by the plaintiffs' definition, even an independent review of a lawful product is "advertising," and they think they are entitled to any info that touches on essentially any YouTube video about the M&P15 during the relevant period.
Reeves went on to point out that "treating independent editorial coverage as corporate marketing merely because someone reviewed a lawful product is a dangerous theory that reaches far beyond the gun industry." He's absolutely right, and I'm guessing that he'll be raising this same objection in legal filings and not just on social media.
You can imagine the chilling effect that this could have on content creators going forward. It doesn't help that YouTube has launched a new policy that's also likely to have a chilling effect on videos featuring firearm content.
YouTube recently unveiled a Branded Content Policy. As John Crump explained in a piece at Ammoland on Monday:
Creators must check a box in Studio if a video was influenced by a company in exchange for payment, a sponsorship, or a free product—now or later. YouTube then slaps a branded-content label on the video and may auto-apply that label if its systems think the creator forgot. The FTC already requires the same honesty: a material connection, including a test and evaluation (T&E) gun that never cost the reviewer a dime, must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously in the video itself, not buried in a description.
The collision is what YouTube forbids after that box is checked. Branded content “featuring weapons or ammunition” is prohibited. The policy is not limited to the 30-second ad read. YouTube says it applies to the entire video. A holster sponsor, an ammo company, or a manufacturer that shipped a rifle for a range test can turn a full review into prohibited branded content the moment the creator tells the truth about how the gun arrived.
That is how the T&E model breaks. For years, a company sent a firearm through a federal firearms licensee (FFL), the creator ran it, said on camera that Company A provided it for testing, checked YouTube’s paid-promotion box, and either returned the gun or kept it under the contract. Federal law still demands that sentence. Checking the box now maps the whole video onto a category YouTube lists next to recreational drugs and counterfeit goods.
Skip the disclosure and the FTC can treat the review as a deceptive endorsement. Check the box and YouTube can strike or delete the video—and three strikes in 90 days can kill the channel.
On the front end, content creators that feature firearms in their videos are now caught in a Catch-22, and on the back end they're now potentially the targets of anti-gun lawfare by groups like Everytown for Gun Safety if their content features any gun made by a company that's being sued.
Crump says that YouTube's new policy is a "structural attack" on gun media, and will "push more channels toward Rumble, X, and direct-to-fan platforms," as well as "starve viewers of the independent testing that used to exist between a press release and a finished product."
All of that is true, but on an even more fundamental level this new policy (and the new front in lawfare) denormalizes gun ownership by pushing gun-related content to more niche platforms instead of keeping it accessible on the most mainstream platform of them all.
I love sites like Pepperbox.tv, but they're hardly an alternative to YouTube in terms of its reach. Even if they were (or will be one day), with gun control groups now drafting content creators to serve in their lawsuits against gun makers, distributors, and sellers, gun ownership isn't some fringe activity, and gun-related media shouldn't be relegated to smaller sites. Between YouTube making it increasingly difficult for creators to cover firearms and Everytown-backed attorneys treating independent reviews as potential evidence in lawsuits against gunmakers, that's exactly where things seem to be headed. You don't have to ban "gun culture" online if you can simply make it harder and harder for the rest of the country to see it.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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