One AR-15 owner, frustrated by the recent mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, decided to take a stand, filming a video of himself destroying the rifle. But Aaron Lawrence didn’t use a conventional method for trying to render the rifle inoperable. Instead, he took an axe, striking the AR-15 multiple times before dismantling it.
As reported by NBC 12, Lawrence received the AR-15 several years ago as a gift. He stored the rifle in the attic for years, only occasionally bringing it down for target practice.
While he states that firing the gun was great for his ego, he asserts that no one needs an AR-15 for self-defense, going as far as to say, “I want these guns banned.”
Lawrence posted a video on Facebook showing him taking an axe to his AR-15. In the post, he said, “I guarantee that if I was talking to one person a split second before they died by a weapon of this type of force, they would have told me what I’m about to do is absolutely worth it.”
He placed the AR-15 rifle flat on a tree stump and struck it multiple times with an axe, occasionally having to recenter the Ar-15 on the stump. Lawrence said, “This is one less gun, one less gun that can kill somebody,” as he worked to destroy the rifle.
“I considered destroying it after Sandy Hook,” he stated, referring to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that resulted in the deaths of 26 people, including 20 children.
Lawrence claimed that the reason he didn’t take action after Sandy Hook was “due to the fact that I thought I would lose friends or make someone angry because I did something that seemed so extreme or against their beliefs.”
He went on to say, “If I was gonna get rid of it, I was gonna make a big stand, gonna show people that what we are doing right now commonly is not working, and we need to do something different.”
Lawrence said he hoped the video would inspire others to give up these sorts of firearms as well. No word yet on how he intends to destroy the axe, which has just as much potential to kill.
Source: tribunis
