The feds are reportedly "looking into" congressional candidate Karen Mallard after she posted a video showing her cutting off the barrel of her AR-15.
Mallard, a Democrat and school teacher running for Virginia's 2nd Congressional District, posted the video to social media Wednesday in an apparent attempt to gain brownie points with the anti-gun crowd. In the clip, she takes a power saw to an AR-15, slicing off the rifle barrel to well below the federally mandated length of 16 inches.
“Our job is to teach children. It's not to protect them from gun violence. That is the government's job, and they're failing at it," Mallard said in the video, just before picking up the saw and hacking away at her gun.
ABC13 reports:
In a matter of hours, the video drew hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments.
Many of those comments were negative. Some people accused Mallard of political grandstanding.
Several others said Mallard broke federal law by taking a legal firearm and altering it, making it into an illegal one. Many of them referred to details contained within the Sawed-Off Shotgun and Sawed-Off Rifle Act which, in part, prohibits people (except for those permitted by the act) from having a rifle that has been "modified to an overall length of less than 26 inches."
Mallard later posted that she’d turned the sawed-off rifle over to the police.
“Master Police Officer Tonya Pierce, spokeswoman for the Virginia Beach Police Department, confirmed that the rifle was in the department's possession. Pierce told 13News Now the ATF was looking into the situation,” ABC13 reported.
Mallard certainly isn’t the only anti-AR advocate to recently post a video destroying her own rifle. This video of a guy hacking off his own AR-15 barrel went viral in the wake of the Parkland shooting – though it’s not clear how “#OneLessGun” in his home makes schools safer for children, unless this man was planning on using his inanimate object to kill a whole bunch of people.