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Brownells Defends Itself

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I’m glad to be able to say this: Brownells has, present tense, a YouTube channel. Especially glad because, on June 9, Google had shut that channel down without warning or explanation.

Brownells is a family-owned supplier of firearms, firearm parts and accessories, gunsmithing tools, and emergency gear. Well-known and well-regarded by shooters, hobbyists and gunsmiths, the company has a website and a YouTube channel that serves as a “portal to everything shooting and hunting,” as Pete Brownell explains.

Brownells’ YouTube channel is substantial, with almost 1,800 instructional videos and some 71,000 subscribers. Patrons stress that there’s nothing outré, radical, or offensive about the offerings — unless you’re reflexively anti-Second Amendment, I guess.

We’ve got no smoking gun in the form of an explicit admission from Google. But we may plausibly suspect that the firm terminated this YouTube channel for ideological reasons. Perhaps Google shot from the hip here in reaction to the recent spate of school shootings, without pausing to properly distinguish between promoting responsible gun ownership and promoting murder.

We may also never know whether Google expected Brownells to meekly accept the arbitrary snuffing of a resource it had spent so much time and energy developing. In any case, Brownells used Twitter and other forums to urge supporters to call Google and object.

The self-defense paid off. On June 11, Google undeleted the channel. The protests against injustice must have been too many to ignore.

YouTube is no longer a mere platform for video sharing. It has taken political controversy and complaints as excuses to editorialize.

Were it a government, I’d say “censor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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4 replies on “Brownells Defends Itself”

Google is a private company and should have, in a free society, the right to do what it wishes as to its posters and services. Google should state its policies and restrictions openly and publicly, and then face the competition they will create. 
Brownells and its customer base will react, as they already have, in a limited manner.  

Like MA Bell, Google has become a de facto monopoly, minimally beholden to anyone and the specific reason for the Sherman Antitrust Act.
High time for the federal government to actually do its responsibility and break Google up, so that the free market can deal with its partisanship.

High time for the federal government to actually do its responsibility and break Google up, so that the free market can deal with its partisanship.

That sentence is an oxymoron: the free market cannot be achieved by government meddling. Meddling just leads to more problems which lead to more meddling. Real freedom, and the benefits derived therefrom, require the government to keep its big fat nose OUT of anything but instances of true crime (force, fraud, theft). As for google, and its subsidiary, youTube, alternatives are already arising, as they always will in a free market.

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