Patrick Mcmahon
A California father and gun owner was so sickened by last week’s mass shooting in Racho Tehama that he destroyed his rifle on camera to make a point about the ease with which a rifle can become a weapon of mass murder.
Videos by Rare
RELATED: The California shooter’s last words to his mom were a glaring warning sign of things to come
Chad Vachter lives in Rancho Tehama, Calif., which saw one of the United States’ more recent mass shootings. Last week, shooter Kevin Janson Neal killed his wife and buried her under the floorboards of his home the day before he killed his neighbors and several random victims. In the most terrifying part of Neal’s rampage, he plowed a pickup truck stolen from one of his victims into the courtyard of the Rancho Tehama Elementary School, where he fired over 100 rounds.
Neal was carrying two AR-15-style rifles, both of which he had built himself. In all, five people were killed and 14 injured in the bloodbath, with seven children among the injured, according to the Los Angeles Times. School employees are credited with putting the school on lockdown to prevent Neal from entering. Unable to enter the school, Neal fled the scene. He would later be killed by deputies from the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office.
Vachter owns a handgun, a shotgun and an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle (under California law, the Colt AR-15 and some similar rifles are banned by name, but there are substitutes with similar functions).
He learned to shoot when he was a child and likes being a gun owner — but he says that owning the same weapon used in successive mass shootings across the country began to weigh on him, especially after the San Bernadino terror attack in 2015.
His son, who has autism, received treatment at the Inland Regional Center where the shooting took place, according to WDTN. But the Rancho Tehama shooting finally convinced him.
“So when my son is old enough to realize that someone went in there and shot up that place, and he sees that gun in my possession and asks me ‘Why do you have it, daddy?,’ I don’t have a good answer,” he confessed.
In a video, Vachter cuts up and smashes the components of his rifle.
“I can’t do it,” he says. “I can’t have something in my house that so easily could become a part of another situation like that. I’m not gonna be desensitized to it. I refuse to.”
“I feel like I’ve done the only thing I can do in this equation, even if it’s a small thing,” he concluded.
Vachter will be keeping his shotgun and handgun, he says.
