Your Privacy Choices
Did you ever read about “Boaty McBoatface”? Facially, it’s a true news story. The gist; in 2016, the Brits polled the internet for assistance in naming a new research ship. Certainly, this seemed like a good idea at the time – using democracy to come up with a popular name.
It was not a good idea.
Someone (correctly) suggested that it might be funny to name a $300 million dollar research vessel something trite like perhaps, “Boaty McBoatface.” The concept took hold and the public overwhelmingly selected Boaty McBoatface as the name for the ship. Not because it might be the name each individual would have chosen themselves, but because the internet collectively realized that it would be funny to punish the effort to include them in such a momentous occasion. In the end they compromised (cheated) and named a small submarine Boat Mcboatface instead.
Failing to heed this cautionary tale, Hi-Point repeated the exercise.
At SHOT Show 2019, Hi-Point gave TFB the first look at their upgraded C9 pistol. The C9 is Hi-Point staple, an inexpensive, no-frills budget gun that is reliable. Well, Hi-Point wanted to add those missing frills. The video below contains more detail as to the changes, but the second generation Hi-Point C9 was introduced to the world.
The problem was, it didn’t have a name.
Hi-Point (unwisely) turned to the internet for help. They kicked of the “Name the 9” contest, asking for nominations for names favoring their present “couple of letters and couple of numbers” model name format. Derivatives of “PS” were popular: Short for “problem solver”, this was born when a documentary interview of an anonymous gang-banger showed a none-the-wiser audience his “Glock 40”, which he referred to as “his problem solver”.
Indeed, it was not a thug-life-status-symbol Glock, but a much cheaper Hi-Point. This effort to harvest street cred was funny on a number of levels, and became an instant meme.
But the “problem solver” never stood a chance. Instead, an underdog quickly overtook all contenders: That dark horse was the “Yeet Cannon.”
More or less, to “yeet” is to throw forcefully, but as words sometimes do, it acquired other less-defined meanings. The multi-purpose term caught on, probably because it sounds silly and is almost pleasingly onomatopoeic. So, like Boaty McBoatface, “Yeet Cannon” captured the hearts and minds of the gunternet. It’s worth noting that a bit of the edge was lost when the gun community went full yeetard and almost ran the name into the ground, yeeting around “yeet” like it was just yote yeetsterday.
Hi-Point preliminarily announced via social media that “Yeet Cannon” was the leading name by a huge margin.
Hi-Point is known for being a good sport as far as gun companies go. They have to have a thick skin. Hi-Point makes the cheapest working guns on the market, so they catch quite a bit of heat from elitists in the community (I used to mock Hi-Point as well, but changed my tune after reviewing several of their products). They roll with the punches.
So imagine the disappointment when the voting came out for the new gun, and “Yeet Cannon” wasn’t on the ballot.
The internet seethed over. Taking things perhaps a little too seriously, commenters, shooters, gun memers, and influencers lost their collective minds, picked up the torches and pitchforks, and besieged Hi-Point. A change.org petition asking Hi-Point to follow through on the YC-9 earned almost 2,000 signatures. I’m sure threats of physical violence ensued.
Manufacturers even got in some shots, many of them promising to make guns bearing the “yeet cannon” moniker if Hi-Point wasn’t going to follow through. The climax definitely arrived when Heckler & Koch, perhaps the least fun gun company in the industry (that somehow has the most fun social media managers) derided Hi-Point and said that they would consider rollmarking one of their guns as the “yeet cannon”.
It whipped the yeet mob into a frenzy.
Hi-Point, meaning to do the right thing, fell victim to a classic blunder. They removed the name “yeet cannon” from the ballot because the ballot was to pick the runner up. Hi-Point did not disclose the fact that “Yeet Cannon” had not been eliminated because they wanted to make us think it had been. Brilliant. Troll the fans back with a little of their own medicine, and then pleasantly surprise everyone by revealing that the YC was still in the game all along.
However, Hi-Point miscalculated. They failed to realize that the gun community contains more butthurt-prone nerds than even the sci-fi community, and the good-natured midwestern company didn’t expect that the hivemind was going to do what the hivemind does best, which is suck all of the fun out of the game by going overboard in reacting to what should have been a clever rejoinder.
Accordingly, Hi-Point was sadly forced to react to internet outrage by prematurely announcing that “Yeet Cannon” was going to be a finalist, and that its omission from the official ballot was intended as a joke.
Of course, a number of gun memers and influencers didn’t believe that Hi-Point ever intended to bring back the Yeet Cannon, so they crowned themselves the gun internet champions for *forcing* Hi-Point to bring the title back. Kind of like when Rick Moranis as Louis Tully “successfully” used his proton gun to bring down the forcefield around the museum in Ghostbusters 2 in front of a crowd of onlookers. (And is it just me, but was Janine kind of hot?)
Slime me whenever, momma.
In any event, Hi-Point stood true to their word and followed through. Online voting almost unanimously crowned the second generation C9 as the “Yeet Cannon,” and the next evolution of the Hi-Point 9mm will be entitled…the Yeet Cannon. In fact, Hi-Point is already yeeting pre-orders for the “Yeet Cannon G1”, i.e., the 1st Generation Yeet Cannon, i.e., the Hi-Point C9. That way, you can get a yeet skeeter right now and yeet your yeets off until the Gen 2 yeets its way to your local gun yeeter.
