The column's author also brings up something that came up in a discussion on my Facebook timeline:
One last point, and it does directly concern race. VODA is targeting his closest demographic for business: black gun owners new to the firearm world. He is targeting gun owners who do not yet know what right looks like. They’re uneducated in basic gun safety and fundamentals.
He is propagating unsafe firearms techniques and downright dangerous weapons manipulation, and here is an unfortunate result of that: he has a following that agrees with him based strictly on race rather than skill, proficiency, or the ability to instruct.On Bookface, I had noted:
Now that you mention it, he's a direct parallel to the Gun Bunny phenomenon, only on the pigmentation axis rather than the bathroom one.The shooting community is constantly trying to reach out to under-served demographics, and sometimes in the guise of encouragement and evangelism, hand out accolades and attagirls where they're not necessarily deserved. In the best case, these serve their intended effect and keep an uncertain person in the game and striving.
In the worst case, the seeds of unwarranted encouragement land on the fertile soil of narcissism and result in people "innovating" combat techniques that shoot range ceilings and only avoid slicing their gun hand open or shooting their knife hand by pure dumb luck. At some point, this guy was given NRA Instructor certs (which have since been wisely revoked):
Yes, he's crossing his knife hand in front of the muzzle with his finger on the trigger. |
But neither the guy in the video (who claimed he was "innovating" a new "platform", because apparently we just use buzzwords at random now) nor his intended customers know enough to even ask these questions.