YouTube Grinch Steals Gun Owner’s Christmas Gift to Relatives

“We wanted to let you know our team reviewed your content, and we think it violates our child safety policy,” an email from YouTube received Christmas Eve announced. “We know you may not have realized this was a violation of our policies, so we’re not applying a strike to your channel.

They removed a family video I’d just uploaded after converting a Super 8 tape of a trip to Butte, MT, taken back in 1993 to digital.  Why?

“Content that endangers the emotional and physical well-being of minors isn’t allowed on YouTube.”

Cue Gary Coleman from Diff’rent Strokes:

“What’choo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”

“We use a combination of automated systems and human reviews to detect violations of our Community Guidelines,” the email informed, without informing me of what triggered the ejection. They offered a chance to appeal if I believed it was a mistake by clicking a link (with no chance for Q&A), so I did, and am awaiting their response.

It also included a link to YouTube’s “Child Safety Policy” telling people how to report objectionable/illegal content, including “Sexualization of minors… Harmful or dangerous acts involving minors… Misleading family content [and] Cyberbullying and harassment involving minors.”

I haven’t done any of that. But it then states if this is a first warning, they’ll likely not penalize a “violator” more, allow him to take training to get a warning expunged, and that if he still doesn’t shape up, they’re going to ship him out. (I apologize to those outraged by my using a masculine pronoun. I’m from the “Yes sir/yes ma’am” no-question-about-it era, some habits now found hanging offenses by indignant cultural Marxists are hardwired into me, and trying to choose between xe/xir or ze/zir makes my head hurt.)

Still at a loss, further exploration tells me that due to a Federal Trade Commission mandate, “Failure to set your content appropriately may result in consequences on YouTube or have legal consequences under COPPA and other laws.” Of course I set it as “made for kids.” It’s a family video. About my kid. So, could I now be in trouble with the feds?

Let me set up the backstory.

My wife and I met when we were both living in California, got married before we decided to start having children (I told you, I’m a patriarchal dinosaur),  and once we did, we tried to keep our parents back east apprised of the adventures we had raising the grandkids they could generally only see maybe once a year in person. I took a lot of videos and regularly snail mailed them to her folks and mine so they could share our joy with us, and to let them know we loved and missed them.

Fast forward to the present: I’ve got a ton of tapes from the old days and about a year ago found a local video transfer service, a family-owned business run by salt of the earth people who do great work and charge a fair price to professionally produce results I’d no doubt muck up and don’t have time to mess with anyway.

What I’ve been doing is uploading the flash drive files to YouTube so that I could share them with our brothers and sisters, giving them footage most have never seen that not only include our boys, now grown up, but also of our beloved parents, no longer with us but in memory. I’d intended to share the video with my wife’s side because it has many scenes with their mother, gone since 1998, and my sister-in-law’s late husband, who passed in 2017.

And I always post the family videos as “unlisted,” meaning only people I send the link to may view them.

That’s because I decided long ago not to post photos or even the names of my children on the internet. Aside from their privacy rights that I respect, what I do is controversial enough with some, and any pushback is mine to bear, not theirs. Get some lunatic “liberal” publicly wishing your kids to be shot dead and you’ll know where I’m coming from (and yes, I included an old photo in that post, but it was decades old by then).

And that brings us to the reason I believe my video was removed. Because I’ve identified three possible segments in it that someone who’s insane might try to invoke the Child Safety Policy against.

The first is with my late brother-in-law, a retired miner and somewhat of a local legend for his work with youth baseball in Butte (they’ve got a Distinguished Little League Graduate Award and a ballfield named after him there) driving me on a tour of the town. He was pointing out old landmarks, explaining how mining operations used to work, telling me about the various cultures that built the town, and more. At one point we passed through the old prostitution district, and he showed me where the paid cops used to stand at each end of the access road for a security presence.

It hardly seems likely that triggered any “sexualization of minors” flags because the Butte Chamber of Commerce hosts a non-age-restricted and totally family-friendly Trolley Tour, that among other sites, points out the Dumas Brothel Museum.

The second segment that may have tripped a wire is our then-two-year-old son in the bathtub, singing “Humpty Dumpty.” The thing is it doesn’t show anything below his chest and YouTube hosts plenty of child bathing videos that show a lot more. The kind of sicko who would even equate that with anything more is the type still raging over the lost election.

There’s a third possibility, but first we need to get through taking our boy to see the local fire and police department community fairs, a trip to the local mall to see Thomas the Tank Engine (See? Made for kids.) and then a trip to a place we bought into years ago up in the Sequioa National Forest that gave them a taste of California beyond our beach city to include cabins, mountains, trees, deer, a lake with boats, fish, ducks and geese, horses and …  a gun range.

I used to take my kids up from an early age because, having guns in the house, I wanted to provide them with development-appropriate training. Unlike prohibitionists who try to bamboozle people into accepting them as “commonsense gun safety advocates,” my own experience informs me that there are few more dangerous conditions around guns than ignorance.

So, about a minute of the hour-long footage, almost to the very end, includes a trip to the outdoor range, one I frequented every time we went up to the Southern Sierra-Nevadas. No one else was there and as long as we were, I decided to squeeze off a few shots with a handgun to show my brother back east where I would take him the next time he visited.

I was standing at the shooting rest. My wife was videotaping from about 50 feet away, near where we parked the car. My young son was next to her happily riding his tricycle on the dirt. She got a perfect shot of me hitting a target and that was it.

That brings us back to “Harmful or dangerous acts involving minors,” which includes:

“content that shows minors… Using firearms unsupervised…”

Honest, the kid was nowhere near my gun, and I was 41 at the time, a Second Amendment advocate experienced with a multitude of firearms and versed in safe gun handling. As mentioned above, early trips to the range would help prepare for the next life lessons, from watching Daddy clean them, to the first Red Ryder, and beyond, to where, thanks to pal Len Savage, he  could safely handle the firing line at Knob Creek.

The simplest explanation is that YouTube agrees with the gun prohibitionists on zero “tolerance” for young people being anywhere near them. But who at YouTube?

Remember that “combination of automated systems and human reviews” mentioned in the email as the Community Guidelines arbiters? For the former, we’re not only dealing with Garbage In/Garbage Out, but also crazy AI prone to hallucinations. As for the human gatekeepers, what are their qualifications for being authorities on safe and age-appropriate firearms training and practices, where do their political sympathies lie, and do they even come from a culture where adults are allowed to have them?

I’m reminded of when Facebook found my post wishing readers “a contemplative Bill of Rights Day” violated its community standards.

They’re right. It does.

No matter on YouTube though. While I’ve been composing this, I’ve been uploading the banned video to Rumble and now have a new link I can send to my wife’s siblings so they can visually embrace their departed loved ones and share some wholesome family fun from days gone by. I still have time to send them the link for Christmas.

The hell with the YouTube censorship platform and whatever their stupid review team decides. I’ll be transferring my stuff that’s on there as time permits and thinking twice about sharing monetized “gunfluencer” videos if I can find them on a different platform.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.