Would You Buy From a Gun Home Shopping Channel?

If you’re like me and don’t live in the Coachella Valley of California, you likely didn’t even know this channel existed. I didn’t know about it until after I heard that it abruptly stopped broadcasting.

Turns out, there was a channel called “Gun TV,” which was a home shopping channel unlike any other. It abruptly stopped broadcasting in January and halted sales after being on the air less than a year. Gun TV was the idea of two people, Valerie Castle and Doug Bornstein, of Rancho Mirage, California. Both are said to be “veterans” of the home shopping industry. They called the channel “iTunes for guns” and sold ammunition, holsters, and accessories.

Castle said in an e-mail that Gun TV was “pulling back on operations” while it looks at distribution options. “This is a simple business decision — we are confident we will be broadcasting again soon,” Castle said.

The channel has not vacated the studio where it was filmed out of. However, reports I found indicated that the studios were moving ahead on finding other uses for the space because they are anticipating that the channel will be moving out. Why did it fail? It sounds like a variety of things went wrong. The owners said it would be a 24-hour channel but in actuality it only broadcast six hours a day from 10pm to 4am–not the hours of the highest ratings. And apparently, it was simply not well received, as there was too much opposition to the idea.

The gun channel’s timing was not good either. After criticisms were directed to the channel, it said that 3 minutes of every hour of programming would be dedicated to the topic of gun safety. The channel announced in November 2015 that it was on track to start broadcasting in January 2016. However, just a couple of weeks after this announcement, on December 2, 2015, a gunman was killed in a domestic terror attack at the social services center in San Bernardino, California. That turned a lot of attention to the topic of guns in California which likely hurt the channel. The start was delayed by a few months due to that, then began broadcasting on April 1. That date probably was not thought through, as many people apparently thought it was a prank. It wasn’t. But apparently the channel never recovered.

Image from desertsun.com courtesy of Gun TV