After Las Vegas, YouTube is banning video tutorials to make guns shoot faster

YouTube.
(Image credit: iStock)

YouTube has responded to the Las Vegas shooting by expanding its category of prohibited content. The shooting suspect, Stephen Paddock, used a device called a bump stock to make his weapons fire more rapidly, and YouTube will now ban all video tutorials showing users how to make this modification to their own guns.

"We have long had a policy against harmful and dangerous content," the site said in a statement. "In the wake of the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, we took a closer look at videos that demonstrate how to convert firearms to make them fire more quickly and we expanded our existing policy to prohibit these videos."

The decision is unlikely to ruffle many feathers as YouTube is a private company and thus unregulated by the Second Amendment. Furthermore, even the NRA has expressed support for "additional regulations" on bump stocks.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.