Gun Owner Outraged By Mass Killings Cuts Up His AR-15 (Video)

SCOTCHTOWN, NY — Scott Pappalardo has owned his AR-15 assault-style rifle for more than three decades. The Scotchtown, New York, man is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. He owns multiple guns and even has a tattoo on his arm of a rifle with a banner that reads "the right to keep and bear arms."

But he's had enough.

After last week's mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 students and faculty dead, Pappalardo, who works for a materials supply company, took drastic measures to ensure his gun never falls into the wrong hands: He chopped it up with a table saw and posted video of himself doing so on Facebook.

In the video, which was posted Saturday and has since been seen more than 19 million times, Pappalardo says he told his wife following the mass slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that he'd gladly give his gun up if it saved "the life of just one child."

"Since then, over 400 people have been shot in over 200 school shootings," he says in the video. "So I guess my words were just empty words in the spur of the moment. And now here we are. Seventeen more lives lost."

It's guns like his AR-15 that ultimately kill people, he says. Not video games. Not the internet. Not bad parenting. Not mental illness. Guns.

Many people argue that bad guys will find a way to get guns even with stricter gun laws, he says, so why punish law-abiding gun owners?

"I'm going to give you a newsflash: Until the other day, Nikolas Cruz was a legal gun owner," he says. "Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, killing 58 people, was a legal gun owner until that night. And quite frankly, anyone, any legal gun owner, is capable of snapping. And committing a horrific crime. Even without mental illness."

Pappalardo says he could fetch up to $800 by selling the weapon, but couldn't live with himself if the child of the person he sold it to decided to take it to school and slaughter people. He says the right to own such a powerful weapon isn't more important than someone's life and he is going to ensure it will never happen with his weapon.

"So, I've decided today that I'm going to make sure this weapon will never be able to take a life," he says. "The barrel of this gun will never be pointed at someone."

In the video, Pappalardo then walks over to a table saw, cuts off the gun barrel and brings back the severed gun to show.

"People have always said, 'there's so many of them out there,'" he says. "Well now, there's one less."

It was a personal choice to destroy the weapon, Pappalardo says, and it's a choice that might not be right for everyone. It won't solve "all the problems," he says, and he believes in his heart there isn't one single answer to the epidemic of school shootings.

"I'm hoping that maybe someone will see this and say maybe I'll do the same thing," he says. "And for all you haters out there that think I'm stupid for doing this, I hope and I pray that it doesn't take the barrel of one of these guns pointed at your child's head to change your mind."

Pappalardo tells Patch the shooting at Sandy Hook deeply affected him and got him to re-think the AR-15. Florida pushed him to destroy it.

"You felt for the parents of the children and the children that survived and had to witness that," he says. "Those children couldn't express what they saw and what they felt because they were too young."

He says the mass slaying in Las Vegas was also "horrific," but that seeing children slaughtered impacted him on a deeper level.

"It was nothing like seeing 17 people — most of them children — being murdered," he says. "And then to see the kids that had to witness that and live through that just really affected me deep. It was just enough. It was enough."

He's glad the video has been seen so many times, even if it's gotten him a lot of unwanted attention — something he's still processing.

"I'm very happy that it has had the reaction it has because obviously I felt very passionate about it, otherwise I wouldn't have cut up a gun that I really loved," he says.

He was drawn to the gun as a young man because he liked shooting and liked how the gun was perceived at the time he bought it.

"It was a cool weapon," he says, adding: "As an 18 or 19-year-old kid, whatever I was at the time 30 years ago, it was a neat thing to get."

Danielle Pappalardo, Scott's wife, tells Patch she and her husband have differing political views — she goes "back-and-forth" on the Second Amendment — but that Scott was known to defend his right to bear arms. It was no small feat that he decided to move forward with destroying the weapon — a decision he first ran by her.

She told him the decision was his to make. She didn't push him one way or the other.

"He understands it can't keep going the way it is," she says. "For 50 years people weren't ripping guns out of peoples' hands even though that's the fear printed on everybody. Something has to be done though."

Pappalardo says the weapon is "completely inoperable" and has since been handed over to law enforcement authorities. This will be the only gun he chops up.

The others he's keeping.

Photo credit: Danielle Pappalardo, used with permission