Last week, just prior to the March For Our Lives protest, YouTube announced a new change in its policy for videos featuring guns that will result in a huge swath of gun content disappearing from the site in April. This is a big deal because, to date, YouTube has been a major hub for gun-lovers. In fact, it’s often been called “Guns & Ammo for the digital gun community.”
In retaliation, many of the most prominent gun channels (e.g., InRange TV) have either voluntarily deleted their YouTube accounts in protest or have declared their plans to take their content elsewhere.
As to where, the immediate answer has been PornHub, the world’s second largest video-sharing site and the 33rd most popular website in the world. This, however, seems like a temporary solution at best. For instance, my quick search for “guns” on PornHub is a mixed bag:
At the top right, there’s a video from InRange TV entitled “Glock 19 vs. Hudson H9.” So far, so good — it’s a straightforward gun-range comparison of two popular handguns. But in the next row of results, on the left, there’s a much different kind of gun porn. The video, called “Crazy Girl Fucks Her Pussy With A Gun,” is exactly what the title claims: A seemingly mentally unstable young woman has vaginal sex with a handgun.
Below that is a video called “Bringing Out the Big Guns!” At first, it, too, looks like something you’d find on YouTube — a SFW show-off-your-gear vid that highlights a dude’s cache of rifles. But then, a woman brings her cache of old guns to a pawn shop, and next thing you know, she’s fucking in the backroom. Adjacent to that gun fantasy, is an incredible piece of amateur filmmaking entitled “Bearded White Trash Blow-Job While Shooting His Gun and Shotgunning A Beer” — 48 seconds of gun-loving, dick-sucking, beer-chugging bliss.
Needless to say, the cultural stigma around porn will likely be a big problem if the gun channels really do consider PornHub as a suitable refuge post-YouTube. (Right now, it seems like an over-the-top protest move that’s meant to draw attention.) For its part, PornHub has indicated in the past that it’s considered making a SFW version of the site, one scrubbed clean of all the adult content. But this idea has mostly been an intra-office joke among PornHub executives. The interesting question, of course: Would gun videos be allowed on PornHub’s SFW site? Or would they get stuck with the other offensive adult content?
Obviously, if gun videos were banned from a porn site, too, that would be a supremely fascinating moment in American history. Guns would officially be more obscene than pornography — at least by those who trade in pornography.
Either way, between all the pearl-clutching and the potential for a PR nightmare, PornHub clearly doesn’t seem like a viable long-term option for gun videos. But if not there, where?
On this survivalist blog, Vimeo is the next logical answer.
It’s plausible enough. According to Vimeo’s Terms of Service, the site doesn’t explicitly ban videos featuring guns or gun instructional videos. And if you search for AR-15, you’ll find roughly 4,000 results, including this woman in a desert blowing up a bag of Cheetos with her assault rifle, while the soundtrack blares “America, Fuck Yeah!” from the movie Team America: World Police. The whole video is so on-the-nose, it feels like a parody of conservative gun porn. It pretty much has to be a troll. There’s no way it’s this unironic. Unless they’re making fun of how liberals would make fun of them.
The number of overall search results (~4,000) is misleading, though. Gun videos begin to trickle out of the results by page three. And by the time you get to page six, only three of the eighteen videos listed feature firearms. The 15 other vids are a hodgepodge of who knows what. Like, who wants to watch “My Tokyo Fairytale Teaser”?
And so, back to the survivalist forums. They must have better ideas of where to find gun videos than PornHub or Vimeo.
Okay, maybe not.
Porn it is then, at least according to IamZeke. He particularly wants other gun enthusiasts to know if they have to gather like social pariahs on tube sites in order to get their gun video fix, it’s still a perfectly dignified existence. In fact, he argues, we wouldn’t have the internet if it weren’t for porn — mainly thanks to Ron Jeremy. (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Still, far from everyone agrees with him (especially the more Christian-minded gun owners):
Plus, as Bob and Trader Bob note, there are still some SFW options out there.
In terms of what these video services are (they’re not exactly YouTube — or even Vimeo — when it comes to name recognition)…
- Real.video bills itself as “COMING SOON: THE ANSWER TO YOUTUBE CENSORSHIP OF FREE SPEECH” and “a pro-liberty video community covering health freedom, food freedom, preparedness, politics, self-reliance and more.”
- Full30.com is a website specifically dedicated to “Firearms Reviews, Education and Entertainment.”
- TheGuntube.com and its sister site Guntube.org are very new to the gun-video game. Case in point: All the top trending videos have less than a 100 views.
Some gun enthusiasts are also fans of Bitchute.com. The video-sharing site was created in protest of YouTube’s earlier de-monetization programs for content creators. But from what the posters in the forums say, Full30.com seems to be the leading favorite to replace YouTube.
One thing is certain: It’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
Will gun enthusiasts ultimately find a happy home on PornHub? Or is this the first step toward a period of social exile from which they’ll never recover? There’s at least some evidence that the latter is a distinct possibility. For example, over the weekend, Remington, one of the largest gunmakers in America, filed for bankruptcy. In its court paperwork, the company cited a distinct decrease in demand for its product. It seems the winds of change are blowing.
For some people, however, change can be scary. They begin to see bogeymen everywhere. And when it comes to gun-lovers, they already have a favorite bogeyman they like to drag out anytime someone talks about gun control.
“Guns are the new books!” I think is the idea here.
Anyway, as they say, it’s a sure sign you’re losing when you drag Hitler out to win your argument.
That said, as Square target points out, it does say a lot that Hitler is allowed on YouTube and gun videos aren’t. But it doesn’t say what he thinks it does. It says something wholly different. The message is: Hitler is history. History is important. Guns, on the other hand, are beginning to look like the past. And do you know what happens to things of the past? They get put down and left behind.
Zaron Burnett III
Zaron Burnett is an investigative journalist and longform features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL.
