Sacha Baron Cohen entered a Riverside, California, gun store wearing a disguise then fled the scene after the gun store’s owner called him out.
Norris Sweidan owns Warrior One Guns & Ammo and he says Cohen entered his business disguised as a Hungarian immigrant last year.
Fox 11 quotes Sweidan saying, “He comes in, off the bat you can see in the video I’m looking like, this guy does not look like a Hungarian immigrant, tight ass leather pants, a beard, it just didn’t fit. The moment his words came out of his mouth I was like this guy is full of s***.”
He said Cohen had a camera crew with him and claimed to be filming a documentary, part of which would focus on him buying a gun.
Sweidan said, “I’m looking at the producer and I’m just like am I being fooled right here? And I just kept looking at the guy and I was like you’re Borat, as soon as I said that his eyes just looked at me like, and he did a turn right out the door.”
Cohen’s crew remained in the store and Sweidan said he told them to leave: “We’re talking to the people they don’t wanna give us an answer, we basically told them to get the f*** out, you guys are all full of s***, have a great day, get out.”
Sweidan says he presumes Cohen was trying to make a video of a gun purchase for his Showtime series, “Who is America?”
Breitbart News reported that Cohen was successful in duping numerous pro-gun conservatives for the show’s most recent episode, Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt and Virginia Citizens Defense League’s Philip Van Cleave among them. Van Cleave stood by Cohen while holding various guns embedded in stuffed animals, quoting reworked nursery rhymes as a way of teaching children to shoot.
Sweidan commented Van Cleave, saying, “You’ve got some gun advocate holding a bunny on some gun, if you’re a gun advocate, what the f*** are you doing holding a gun with a bunny on it, really?”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.