There seems to be no end to stories of people refusing to wear face masks, so Allen Pan got quite creative in his response to these anti-maskers. His innovative gun makes the idea of shooting a mask onto people’s faces an internet-famous, hilarious reality.
Through his YouTube channel, Sufficiently Advanced, Pan documented his latest project and went viral for showing the contraption in action on Twitter.
America has a pandemic problem so I solved it by making a gun: pic.twitter.com/WRaiuVU90K
— Allen Pan (@AnyTechnology) August 15, 2020
Pan began his YouTube video with a compilation of public mask freakouts that showed multiple people attacking store employees over their mask policies.
“It feels like people just aren’t wearing masks,” Pan says in the video. “And they should be! So what are we going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?”
He contemplates making a “fun educational video about how safe and effective masks are,” but decides that they’ve already been done before. Both health experts and celebrities, like Bill Nye, have famously conducted their own experiments to demonstrate why masks are effective. However, Pan notes that these videos have done nothing to convince mask naysayers.
“This is not a world of fact anymore,” he says. “This is a world of opinion and emotion. And if there’s one thing that coronavirus protesters actually care about, it’s the Second Amendment. That’s right: guns!”
Thus, the mask-shooting gun was created.
Mask-Shooting Gun in Action
After testing out the gun on different dummies and himself, Pan took to the streets of Huntington Beach, California to put his creation to work. Huntington Beach is known to be one of the most conservative cities in Southern California. Throughout the pandemic, it was also a hotspot for coronavirus protests and anti-mask sentiment.
Sadly, the gun broke while Pan was testing it on-site, leaving Pan unable to carry out his experiment safely. Once near the beach, he noticed that many more people were wearing masks at the beach than he anticipated. Pan noted that around 25% of beachgoers had some type of face covering.
Instead, he began handing out free masks and letting others test out the gun on a mannequin head. Then, the video closed out to the “Star-Spangled Banner” as he left one last message for anti-maskers — they were outnumbered. He provided a survey from AP News that showed a large majority of adults, about 75% of the survey, favored face mask requirements.
Pan’s full video can be viewed below:
Mask Shooting Gun — Sources
Allen Pan — Sufficiently Advanced, YouTube channel
Distractify