Hillsboro Father Gets Guns Destroyed, Wants Others To Follow His Lead

HILLSBORO, OR — Benjamin Beers is not the squeamish type. He’s a former Marine who spent four years during the Iraq War manning a .50-caliber heavy machine gun, providing security for convoys.

“I know what big guns are like, what kind of damage they can do,” he said. “I also know that there are some guns that just have no business being owned by civilians.”

The news on May 24 — another mass shooting, this one in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 dead, including 19 children — guaranteed that at best Beers would have a restless night. Again.

“Every time there’s a mass shooting, especially when it involves a school, I can’t sleep, can’t get the thoughts of people suffering out of my head,” he said from his home in Hillsboro. “That night, I cried. I tossed and turned. I didn’t sleep.”

When he got up the next morning, he knew that he had to do something.

“I have two daughters, one 10 years, one 10 months,” he said. “I looked at them that morning and knew that something had to change.

“I decided that I had to get rid of my guns.”

Beers had a 9 mm handgun and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

“When you’re a Marine, you love your rifle,” he said. “You sleep with it; you’re cleaning it every five seconds; you recite creeds to it. That’s great when you’re a Marine. Once you’re a civilian, why do you need it? Who needs a weapon whose sole purpose is to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible?

“I’ve been around guns for much of my life," he said. "I’m not a gun enthusiast. I know what they can do. I understand their power.”

That morning, Beers, wearing a white Nike T-shirt and sunglasses, picked up his phone and opened TikTok and said the following.

“Today, I’m turning in my weapons to the Hillsboro Police Department in Oregon. Both my AR-15 and my 9 mill handgun. I no longer want them. I know this will not change legislation or anything to do with gun culture in America, but, hopefully, it will be a form of symbolism. Hopefully America can wake up. Because no other country has the problems that we do with gun culture and ideation and gun violence that we do. Amend the Constitution. Amend the legislation. Amend the statutes.”

He then stopped the video, drove to the Hillsboro Police Department and turned in his guns, along with more than 200 rounds of ammunition.

Beers then uploaded the video.

It has been seen close to 200,000 times.

“I had no idea what kind of response there would be,” he said. “Not just the number of people who have watched the video, but the calls that I’ve been getting from all over the world. I no longer look at my guns the same way that I used to, and I think I’m not alone.”

When he was overseas, Beers was fighting in a “global war on terror,” he said. He thinks that that war has come home and is being fought among Americans.

“When these shootings happen, these are acts of terror,” he said. “Having these guns is not patriotic. Making it easier for people to kill children is not patriotic. It seems like we live in a country where we make it easier to buy a gun than any number of things. It shouldn’t be like this. Parents should be able to send their kids to school knowing that they will come home.”

Beers is a stay-at-home dad. His wife, Christine, works full time at a real estate job. With all the shootings, with “what’s going on in the world, I cherish the time that I get to spend with" his family, he said. “I want to make sure that they have a better world than we do. One without these kind of shootings.”

Beers' older daughter isn’t really aware of the mass shootings, he said. But she knows that the world can be dangerous. She’s also become aware that her father is on the phone a lot recently, even on television.

“I tell her that Daddy is talking to people about how he used to have these guns and how he got rid of them because no one should have them,” Beers said. “I tell her that I’m telling people that some things are dangerous, and it should be very hard to get things that are dangerous.”

Beers reached out to Ceasefire Oregon, a gun safety advocacy group, because he would like to become more involved, he said. He hopes that more people will turn in their guns.

Not every police department is set up to take large amounts of guns, but many are prepared to accept some and help people who want their weapons destroyed. People just need to call their local police, Beers said.

“This isn’t a problem anywhere else in the world,” he said. “It’s a problem here because we let it continue. That has to stop.”