In the wake of the Florida school shooting, activists on the left have been in their standard mode of screaming for someone to “do something” without much of a clear idea as to what that “something” might be. With no government action on that front, online giants with influence in the retail sector, including Facebook and Google, decided to take action on their own. They began suppressing advertising for the sale of guns. (Which the New York Times described as simply fabulous.)

So… no more advertisements for gun sales. But it wasn’t that easy to implement apparently. They didn’t just block ads for the sale of firearms. They wound up blocking ads for anything even vaguely related to guns, sometimes with hysterical results. In one of the more extreme examples of that phenomenon, they managed to supress advertisements for gun safety locks, including those from ZORE, a company that doesn’t even sell guns. Just safety devices designed to do precisely what supporters of the advertising ban claimed they hoped to achieve. This from Mairead Mcardle at National Review.

A gun-safety-lock company was baffled when several powerful advertising platforms cracked down on its ads, citing policies restricting ads for firearms sales. Facebook, Twitter, and Google aggressively limited or rejected ads for the company ZORE even though it does not sell guns but gun-safety locks that could potentially save lives. The gun lock, the first of its kind, has received good reviews from the gun community. A representative for ZORE said gun owners have embraced the lock because it is effective at preventing unauthorized use of firearms while remaining quickly and easily accessible to authorized users. In contrast, many gun owners rejected other safety devices such as smart guns or biometric finger locks, the spokesman said.

The ham-handed approach and general stupidity of this maneuver is mostly self-explanatory. National Review has already done a fine job of fisking it, so I won’t keep beating the same dead horse here. But while we’re on the subject, have you seen that ZORE gun safety lock which Google and Facebook managed to banish? I must say, this looks like a brilliant piece of technology. I haven’t had the chance to test one myself, but from all the reviews, it looks amazing. Check out this short video of the lock in action.

This short description from Cave Armor’s review of the product gives you a nice overview.

Sure, we’ve progressed from keys to biometric fingerprint readers, RFID chips, etc. But the team at ZORE didn’t want to create another smart gun that would rely on these still-developing technologies. They wanted something different. The team looked at their backgrounds. They came from families that were in constant fear living in Israel. They knew that having a weapon in the home was a necessity to defending and protecting family members. They identified the two most important qualities in a gun lock solution: security and lighting fast access. Besides its sleek design, the idea behind the ZORE X is to provide quick access to your gun while keeping it secure. The unique design is essentially a round of ammo that slides into the chamber of your gun. It doesn’t put any pressure inside, so there’s no worry about damaging the barrel. You purchase the option with the caliber that fits your gun.

That’s pretty sweet. The only electrical component of the system requiring the battery is the unlocking mechanism. But if you’re worried about the battery being dead when you need it most, it can be set so that the lock opens automatically before the battery dies and it warns you when it’s getting low to boot. This isn’t an endorsement because, as I said, I haven’t tested it myself. But if you get the chance it seems like it’s worth a look.

And to think Facebook and Google shut off advertisements for this product. Great job, guys!