The moment I saw the video going around that featured the “2nd Amendment” advocate “Scott Pappalardo,” something smelled fishy, and the climax of the video proved some suspicions for me.

To sum up his video, Pappalardo, a self-professed lifelong gun owner and 2nd Amendment advocate, claims he’s so into guns that he even has a “2nd Amendment” tattoo on his arm. The guy proceeds to talk about how he’s going to break his semi-auto AR-15 in order to take just one more gun out of the loop because he can’t, in good conscience, allow something to exist that might hurt someone.

For gun control advocates, this is equivalent to porn. For gun owners, it’s worth an eye roll at best.

Naturally, the mainstream media frothed at the mouth over it and helped the video go super viral. It was so effective at getting the gun-control crowd into a frenzy that it even appeared in my own mentions a few times as the real solution to America’s supposed gun problem. For me, however, it just seemed a little too perfect.

The video ends with the guy sawing the barrel of his gun off. That squared it for me, and it proved that either this guy was a fake, or he had dropped off the gun rights side of the argument a while back.

See, sawing the barrel of his gun in half didn’t break the gun. It works just as well as it did before his video started (given it’s not a semi-auto anymore), only now he had made his gun potentially illegal by shortening the barrel too far. What he didn’t do was make it inoperable. He could still easily put in a loaded magazine, chambered a round, and fired a bullet.

Suddenly, for me at least, Pappalardo’s legitimacy seemed rather shaky. If he was the 2nd Amendment advocate he said he was, then he would have known that sawing the barrel off wouldn’t have made the gun any less of a gun. All he did was create an illegal weapon.

He did later post another picture of the second cut he made to the gun through the receiver, but according to the ATF, he still hasn’t properly destroyed the gun. Cuts must be made a quarter-inch in length by welding torch in several places on the receiver, making it impossible to fix. Pappalardo just made one cut on the barrel, making it illegal, and one cut down the receiver with a thin blade.

But more than that, for a 2nd Amendment advocate, he didn’t seem to know a lot of the facts and figures that come with being such a huge fan of his right to keep and bear arms, as his tattoo says. He would have known that AR-15’s being used in mass shootings are actually more infrequent than other weapons, and destroying his equates to more of a show than a boon to society. Furthermore, his rifle is a semi-auto, a very common type of firearm in the United States. His advocacy for ridding the country of rifles like it is a moot move seeing as how most semi-auto crimes are handgun related, and if he’s going to advocate for semi-autos to be destroyed, then he’s just put himself in the gun control advocacy category.

But this would have been something he would stray away from if he was legitimate. He would have known that a rifle in his supposedly trustworthy hands is a sure fire way of making sure people who do use AR-15’s for evil are stopped cold, just like Stephen Willeford did in Texas.

All of this adds up to me thinking that Pappalardo isn’t what he claims he is. Maybe at one point he really did love guns and the right to bear them. I just don’t see it here now. No Second Amendment advocate and gun enthusiast would improperly “destroy” his gun while virtue signaling that he did it to protect people, much less create an illegal gun in the process. A gun enthusiast knows a gun in his hands makes society safer, and the numbers prove it.