Giffords Gets Schooled On the Reality of Ammo Vending Machines

It’s been said (supposedly by Mark Twain) that a lie can get halfway across the world before the truth can get its boots on. This is often true, largely because lies are easier to simplify and tend to be more entertaining than the truth. Truth often requires some work to learn, while an easy lie takes zero effort.

Because people are lazy, busy, and/or simply don’t have spare time to fact check the firehose of inputs they get now for themselves, lies tend to move a lot faster. A recent tweet by the anti-gun organization Giffords is a great example of this . . .

Only in America is ammo as easy to buy as candy. https://t.co/HXbeuAAFn9

— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) July 10, 2024

When word began to spread about ammunition vending machines on social media and stories popped up on TV screens, that’s about all that many people absorbed. It’s a vending machine. Feed it some cash and instead of drinks or snacks, the machine spits out boxes of ammo, right?

That was a perfect opportunity for a gun control operation like Giffords to express outrage and pile on. Most vending machines only want your money. You put in your coins, your dollar bills, or maybe your credit/debit card. Once the machine is satisfied that it has your cash, the food or drink comes out. So it naturally stands to reason that an ammo vending machine would work the same way, right? Heck, maybe you can get a kid with small arms to reach inside the machine to get a free box!

But, as usual, the truth came limping along behind, long after the lies had spread. This obviously started in the comments and replies, but a relatively new feature on the X/Twitter platform helps give the truth more of a boost: community notes.

Instead of having to click into the replies and scroll through to find out they’ve been denied full context, Giffords fans now see right up front that the organization left some important facts out when they claimed ammo is now as easy to buy as candy. While there’s no age limit for people to buy a Snickers bar, there are laws about buying ammunition, and the American Rounds vending machines are subject to them.

To only sell ammo to adults, the machine has a number of security features that snack and soda machines don’t. For one, it scans a government ID to make sure an adult is there. And just in case a kid got ahold of someone else’s ID, the machine also does a full 3D scan of the buyer’s face and matches it to the image on the ID. So until candy machines start scanning your face and driver’s license, Giffords is lying.

Sadly, though, not all social media platforms have community notes. Basically, no other social media outlets do. So anti-gunners’ half-truths and other assorted lies will continue to spread unimpeded on those platforms. It’s still up to us to push for similar improvements to places like Facebook, Instagram, and mainstream media outlets if we want to give the truth the edge it deserves.

There’s also some possibility that civil law could be used to rein in this kind of behavior. As we’ve seen with Nick Sandmann and others, telling lies about people and ruining their reputations is actionable and can be resolved in court. If the ammo vending machine company can show that Giffords intentionally lied about the security of their service and that the lie was meant to hurt the company, they may have a case for going after them.

The more that organizations and media outlets are held accountable for their lies, the more that truth will prevail.