"It made me think."
A new neighborhood shop opened on Manhattan's trendy Lower East Side that raised a lot of eyebrows.
It was a gun store full of firearms ranging from pistols to military rifles and submachine guns. An American flag hung on the wall next to the salesman with some unusual sales pitches.
"Collectors love this one," the salesman told one customer. "Adam Lanza’s mom had this in her collection, too, until he took this and several other guns and killed her and went down to Sandy Hook and killed six teachers and 20 innocent children. Twenty little kids, gone, like that."
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It's a sales pitch you wouldn't hear in any other gun store in the country, and there's a reason for it.
The States United To Prevent Gun Violence teamed up with New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and opened a fake gun store outfitted with hundreds of realistic-looking prop guns, like the kind used in movies. The salesman was an actor and an NYPD official was on the scene the entire two days the fake store was open.
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Several hidden cameras throughout the store captured reactions from prospective buyers when they were saw tags attached to each gun detailing a real instance where that gun was used in a killing.
Leah Gunn Barrett, Executive Director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence told The Washington Post, "The people who came in were actually seriously considering buying a gun. We thought that showing the guns and their histories and getting people to think twice about owning a firearm would be an instructive thing to experience."
Did they get the results they were looking for?
As one man was leaving the store he said, "It made me think, 'I'm not going to buy that gun.'"
