Keith Ratliff is known on the internet as the guy behind the camera in videos for FPSRussia, filming Kyle Myers (an American who speaks with a convincing Russian accent) as he cheerfully shows off cool guns and explosives. Over the past two years, their FPSRussia YouTube channel has grown to be the sixth largest subscriber base in all of YouTube.
But now there is awful news. Brace yourselves, because this is about to get terrible.
The police in northeast Georgia found [Ratliff] dead at his office on Jan. 3, shot once in the head. He was surrounded by several guns, but not the one that killed him. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is treating it as a homicide. [The New York Times]
The NY Times then tried to tie it into gun control debates (so hot right now), but we’re not going to play that a-hole journalist button-pushing hype game because a real human being is dead. Can we not exploit a death to turn a comments section in a flame war then turn to our boss and say, “This one’s getting a lot of heat”? Argh.
No suspects have yet been named. Ratliff was found in his office at FPS Industries, a firearms repair business he had recently opened in Carnesville, Georgia, a city of 540 people near his previous home in Kentucky.
Ratliff was 32 years old and leaves behind a wife and a two-year-old son.
Whether he was filming a machine gun on a quadrocoptor, producing Myers’ top 3 weapons for the apocalypse, or filming his friend gleefully shooting an AA-12 fully automatic shotgun, these two guys always kept us entertained. I don’t have anything profound to say. This just plain sucks.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/72/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/starstrek-150x150.png)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/it-looks-like-nasas-kepler-telescope-has-come-to-the-end-of-the-road-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/USCSS_Nostromo_Interior_001-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/corona-light-150x150.jpg)
Oh Robopanda. Shame on you for getting this wrong.
Keith Ratliff wasn’t the guy in the videos who was faking the Russian accent. That’s Kyle Myers. Keith Ratliff was the behind-the-scenes guy who worked with Kyle to get those videos made.
Ah fuck. I’ll correct this.
Fixed!
Feel free to delete my comment.
Nah, I’ll leave it up. I’m not afraid of people knowing I’m a dumbass.
That’s just sad no matter how you look at it. Even if this guy didn’t help to entertain tons of people, just the thought of someone leaving the world like that with people who love and care about him wondering what happened is just sad. Going to be even worse when the media suddenly exploits this.
Well that sucks. Hope the police are able to get the guy if it is indeed a homicide.
That’s really sad. This is only about 10 minutes from my home, too.
That is really tragic, but obsessively watching ID has taught me that it’s probably someone close to him. Shot once in the head (probably execution style), surrounded by guns (which weren’t then stolen) yet probably didn’t reach one. It’s all very sad.
“The NY Times then tried to tie it into gun control debates” is the fact that people are getting killed by guns not the reason there is a gun control debate in the first place?
Where was Myers at the time?