If there’s one thing we all can agree on, it’s that securing your firearms is a good thing. Not only does it keep small, curious hands from messing with the guns, but it also makes them less attractive to thieves who would then have to defeat the locks.

In fact, of all the things available in the firearms community, gun locks are probably the least controversial product out there.

Hell, anti-gun crusaders are trying to pass laws that require people to lock up their guns.

So why are Facebook and Google blocking ads for the products?

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, activists on the left have been in their standard mode of screaming for someone to “do something” without much of a clear idea as to what that “something” might be. With no government action on that front, online giants with influence in the retail sector, including Facebook and Google, decided to take action on their own. They began suppressing advertising for the sale of guns. (Which the New York Times described as simply fabulous.)

So… no more advertisements for gun sales. But it wasn’t that easy to implement apparently. They didn’t just block ads for the sale of firearms. They wound up blocking ads for anything even vaguely related to guns, sometimes with hysterical results. In one of the more extreme examples of that phenomenon, they managed to supress advertisements for gun safety locks, including those from ZORE, a company that doesn’t even sell guns. Just safety devices designed to do precisely what supporters of the advertising ban claimed they hoped to achieve. This from Mairead Mcardle at National Review.

A gun-safety-lock company was baffled when several powerful advertising platforms cracked down on its ads, citing policies restricting ads for firearms sales.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google aggressively limited or rejected ads for the company ZORE even though it does not sell guns but gun-safety locks that could potentially save lives.

The gun lock, the first of its kind, has received good reviews from the gun community. A representative for ZORE said gun owners have embraced the lock because it is effective at preventing unauthorized use of firearms while remaining quickly and easily accessible to authorized users. In contrast, many gun owners rejected other safety devices such as smart guns or biometric finger locks, the spokesman said.

The ham-handed approach and general stupidity of this maneuver is mostly self-explanatory. National Review has already done a fine job of fisking it, so I won’t keep beating the same dead horse here. But while we’re on the subject, have you seen that ZORE gun safety lock which Google and Facebook managed to banish? I must say, this looks like a brilliant piece of technology. I haven’t had the chance to test one myself, but from all the reviews, it looks amazing.

This is, unfortunately, what happens when you begin to completely stigmatize an entire segment of the American population, gun owners in this case. When you make it acceptable to essentially dehumanize gun owners, you get companies that see no reason to allow advertising of any products that might appeal to them.

I suspect that, over time, we’ll see other products get axed from being allowed to advertise via social media. Companies like Ranger Up, Article 51, and Gruntworks all make clothing that targets veterans and members of the gun community, yet I suspect that, in time, they’ll find their own ability to advertise curtailed as well.

This is a new day, but it shouldn’t be.