Facebook Thinks This is a Weapon

Facebook is going to save us from ourselves. One advertisement at a time.

The social media behemoth told us as much with its latest public statement outlining a change in its advertising policy that will soon prevent advertisers from promoting weapon accessories to people under the age of 18.

Apparently it’s just a checkbox that advertisers need to hit when configuring an ad campaign. Pretty easy and, since there aren’t a whole lot of 15-year-old buying SureFire M600 DFs, let alone that qualify for an NFA tax stamp for a silencer, it’s probably not putting much of a squeeze on firearm accessory-maker’s bottom line.

Come to think of it, Facebook isn’t losing any money as a result, either. The company is perfectly willing to continue taking tactical advertisers’ money as long as they click that checkbox. Doesn’t cost Facebook anything, won’t cost advertisers, seems like a no-brainer way to virtue signal.

And, just like that, with nothing more than the same old drumbeat of, ‘it’s for the children,’ flashlights, optics, gun safes, and knives are now on the list of things our kids are too tender to contemplate.

Let’s forget how many Americans grew up with a .22 leaning against the porch wall. Let’s not even think about all those parents that sat down with their kids to teach them the four rules of responsible firearm handling. We won’t even bring up how many of us first handled a rifle during a Boy Scout sleepaway camp before we even had hair on our… faces.

No, let’s forgo all that and chalk it up to luck that we aren’t all a bunch of serial killers. Let’s dispose of our childhood memories along with our rights to self-protection, self-preservation, and self-reliance on the altar of “for the children” and treat gun violence as if it were some kind of disease we can eradicate with injections of laws, regulations and common sense.

Let’s forget about all that so we can focus on one thing that I’ve yet to see anyone bring up during this latest slash in the thousand-cut attack on gun rights by some big, virtue-signaling company; knives.

Knives? What the hell, Facebook? You’re good with kids getting pitches for toy guns, swords, fake weapons. They can get bullied by asshole peers, watch videos about death-seeking idiots climbing the antennas of half-built skyscrapers, and play multiplayer video games where the goal is to kill as many adversaries as possible (and those opposing players are likely other kids).

Knives.

Non-culinary knives, to be exact.

Advertising a pocket knife is enough to get your business skylined and strung up by the Facebook mods. It’s not new, but the latest assault highlights the larger war on common sense (yes, I’m taking that term back) and brings this stupid knife ad ban into sharp focus as more innocuous tools fall victim to the war on human nature.

I grew up carrying a Swiss army knife nearly every summer day. While I never did use that corkscrew, I did whittle sticks, open soda bottles, scrape countless stickers, pry stuff open (I didn’t know any better…) and cut myself enough to respect my little red friend for what it was; a valuable tool that demanded care, attention, and prudence in its application.

Never once did I consider using it as a weapon. And, I doubt the millions of parents and kids looking at summer camp packing lists right now are wringing their hands over the inclusion of a pocket knife in the list of essentials. In fact, I just saw “Pocket Knife” is the first item on the Boy's Life camping trip packing list.

Yet, here we are today looking for any excuse to label and segregate our children into those we don’t have to worry about and those we do based on the contents of their pockets instead of the content of their character.

Pocket knives aren’t the problem, people that see pocket knives as a problem are the problem.

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