YouTube Banned Gun Making Videos, Yet Still Allows Bomb Making Ones

We, like any site dedicated to the Second Amendment, have already noted the new YouTube rules that hamstring a lot of gun channels. A lot of people are angry, and many are leaving the platform for good. Some gun channels have already migrated over to the porn video sharing PornHub since they, at least, aren’t looking to restrict content.

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However, YouTube is incredibly hypocritical, and it was The Daily Beast who pointed it out first.

Although Austin police are still searching for the motives behind Mark Conditt’s bombing spree, investigators have tentatively concluded he mastered the art of bomb-making from “how to make a bomb” videos found mostly on YouTube.

On any given day there are almost 300,000 videos on YouTube providing step-by-step instructions how to construct bombs—pipe bombs, pressure cooker bombs, you name the type. Some of the videos are the work of teen-age backyard pranksters mixing up household chemicals for “Gatorade bottle bombs” (lethal in their own right), others are so-called “film prop” instructional videos showing how to construct bombs with more “boom” than bark for film-making purposes. But the clear majority are military-grade instructional videos painstakingly walking a would-be Mark Conditt or ISIS bomber how to construct a lethal pipe or pressure cooker bomb.

In the past five years ISIS inspired bombers relied heavily on such tactical YouTube videos to build their homemade bombs. According to Boston police and the FBI, the Boston Marathon Tsarneav brothers constructed their bombs from YouTube videos and Inspire magazine—al Qaeda’s “how to be a terrorist” handbook. So, too, did Syed Farouk and Tashfeen Malik, the San Bernardino terrorists who built a bomb-factory in their garage.

If YouTube’s management is willing to impose restrictions on the sale of firearms, why not also ban instructional bomb-making videos, which are every bit as dangerous?

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It’s a fair question, and I applaud writer Marc Ginsberg for asking it. I don’t agree with Ginsberg that the solution is legislation since I’m pretty sure YouTube can be pressured into making the change without getting the law involved, but what he asked is an extremely valid question.

Where does YouTube get off banning videos that illustrate the construction of a legal item like a firearm while permitting videos showing folks how to make bombs?

I think we can all agree that bombs are far more deadly than firearms in the wrong hands. One well-constructed explosive can kill dozens of people at a time. They’re bad things.

Further, they’re already illegal. You can’t legally build a bomb without all kinds of special licenses, and those with those licenses aren’t sending explosive packages through the mail.

YouTube has known about this content for years and has done nothing. The moment leftist virtue signaling on guns became possible, it threw gun channels under the bus. It treated those channels as if they were enabling terrorists while allowing the real terrorist channels to flourish. If that’s not hypocritical, I don’t know what is.

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Seriously, how many people have to die before YouTube will do something about this content?

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