Matt Brown has a very specific reason for criticizing Dana White’s description of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting as “f***ing awesome,” and it stems from direct personal experience.
White attended the dinner as a guest of President Donald Trump and was present when a gunman breached a security checkpoint and opened fire before being subdued. One police officer was shot but survived thanks to a bulletproof vest. In the aftermath, White told reporters he did not duck under a table and called the experience awesome, describing it as a unique moment he fully took in.
Brown heard those comments and could not let them pass without a response, drawing on something he has rarely discussed publicly. In 2004, Brown attended a Damageplan concert in Columbus, Ohio, when Nathan Gale charged the stage and murdered guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott along with three other people before being shot and killed by an off-duty police officer.
“I’m absolutely flabbergasted. I’ve been in a mass shooting before. I’ve been there when there was a shooting going on, which most people probably haven’t. It is not awesome in any sense of the word. It is not f*cking cool one bit,” Brown said onThe Fighter vs. The Writer. “A dude got shot. Maybe he survived but got shot. That’s a traumatic experience for him. There’s not a single fing thing awesome about that.”
Brown described standing near the stage when Gale began shooting and watching the officer’s fatal response unfold in real time.
“I watched Nathan Gale get his head blown off when Officer Niggemeyer shot him. He had to make a decision in about two or three seconds because the shooter had a hostage. He wasn’t even on duty. He comes in and his whole life changed right there. Someone got shot right next to me.”
He was careful to separate his criticism of White’s word choice from a broader pattern of criticism of the UFC CEO’s public statements.
“Dana says a lot of stuff I think that we could all have opinions about. I’m not very critical of it. I’m like he’s promoting a fight, what do you expect? But that one, I don’t have a lot of respect for. It was very tone-deaf. You just don’t say that. Even if you somehow oddly feel that, it’s just not what you say.”