While performing at the Punk Rock Music & Bowling Festival in Las Vegas on May 27, 2018, NOFX members Fat Mike and Eric Melvin joked around about the Route 91 Harvest mass shooting that left 58 people dead and hundreds more injured. After Melvin suggested that you don’t get shot in Vegas unless you’re in a country band, Fat Mike responded by saying, “That sucked, but at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans.” Take a look at the footage for yourself right here:

Stone Brewing, who created NOFX’s official beer, Punk in Drublic, and sponsored their music festival of the same name, quickly cut ties with the band over the incident, and NOFX was even dropped from the lineup of their own festival. A little while later, the group issued an apology on social media, writing, “There’s no place here to backpedal. What NOFX said in Vegas was shameful.” It went on to say, “We crossed the line of civility. We can’t write songs about how people in this world need to be more decent when we were clearly being indecent.”

NOFX Got Banned From Performing in the U.S. Over a Mass Shooting Joke

By the end of June, Fat Mike took to Instagram to explain to fans that the ramifications of his joke were way worse than anyone was expecting. According to him, all of their upcoming shows in the U.S. had been canceled because of the controversy. Furthermore, Fat Mike claimed he was told that NOFX wasn’t welcome at any major venue in the country. He closed out his statement, which you can read below, by thanking his followers and telling them that the Punk in Drublic tour would still continue overseas.

Though things eventually cooled off, the wound was still too fresh for NOFX to perform at the Punk Rock Music & Bowling Festival in 2021. The band was scheduled to headline on September 24 of that year but dropped out due to complaints. “There has been a lot of hate messages and threats because we are on the bill,” their announcement read. “It just feels wrong. We know we said shitty things that caused it, so we get it. Sorry to everyone that wanted to see us.”

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