Gun supporters need to answer the Mayor Bloomberg-inspired, self-righteous video of celebrities who
The original video, filmed mostly in black and white,features emotional, self-righteous actors who “demand a plan” for the mass shootings that have occurred.The subtext clearly called for banning guns.
There is already one great answer to this video. It is another clip making therounds on the Internet. It repeats the original “Demand A Plan” video content except it contains footage ofviolent movies from some of the same actors demanding a plan to end gun violence.
The footage shows guns blasting and blood splattering. It also includes some very foul language, youknow, the crass, insistent things people usually say when they have a gun pointed at someone else.The video ends with a graphic song, and the words across the screen, and I will try and keep this G-rated,
The hypocrisy of most of the celebrities in the video is low-hanging fruit. Only a quick Internetsearch is needed to discover the actors’ history of making violent, gun-filled movies. And there is ahelpful website, Internet Movie Firearms Database, which details the pistols, rifles or shotguns used bycelebrities in various shoot-’em-up movies or TV shows.
For example, after a brief search, I was able to find that two of the actors in the “demand a plan” video were also involved in the 2010 movie “The Town.” Question: what was anyone from that movie doing in a public conversation on gun violence? “The Town” was so violent that a Time magazine review called one of the characters in the movie “trigger happy.” No one associated with that movie, like Jon Hamm and Jeremy Renner, should be part of any discussion concerning gun violence. Maybe these actors thought no one would research their previous movie credits, but now that the news is out it looks pretty hypocritical.
And couldn’t Jamie Foxx have at least waited a little longer after sounding so excited about getting to kill white people in the movie “Django Unchained?” Foxx made that comment on “Saturday NightLive” only a few days before the Sandy Hook massacre, and less than a month later he is “demanding aplan” to end gun violence.
Well, here’s one plan, just off the top of my head: stop making movies thatglorify gun violence. Take your celebrity role seriously and reject “happy” endings in which one or more people gets shot.But there is yet another “plan” that should be promoted, and that is the plan of arming more good guys inschools, shopping malls, and other public places so that if and when a bad guy shows up to commit massmurder, a good person with a gun will be there to cut short the killing.
There are already many examples of this plan working to save lives. Just a few days before the SandyHook shooting, in Clackamas Town Center, outside of Portland, Oregon, a gunman entered a crowdedshopping mall and started shooting people. A shopper there with a concealed-carry permit drew his gunand pointed it at the gunman. When the gunman saw that someone there might shoot back, he duckedinto a stairway and killed himself. Although two people were killed in that episode, the presence of agood guy with a gun greatly limited the body count.
Almost the same thing happened at a movie theater in San Antonio a few days later, except the good galwith a gun, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, actually fired a shot that ended what could have been a massshooting.The San Antonio movie theater incident was almost an exact repeat of what happened in 2007 in Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, Utah. In that case, a gunman started shooting people in a crowdedshopping center, and he killed five people before an armed off-duty police officer shot the gunman dead.That officer is credited with saving many lives.
Simply put, in these shootings, and in many others, liveswere saved because a good person with a gun was there to fire back.
This point needs to be the gun-rights answer to the “demand a plan” crowd. Our side needs to make itsown video, filmed in the same black and white, in which gun-rights celebrities (there are some), with thesame concerned expressions, invoke the locations of gun massacres that have been stopped short by otherpeople with guns, whether they are private citizens with concealed-carry permits, off-duty deputies, ora police officer who happens to be there. Then the plea, “how many other massacres could have beenstopped?” needs to be made.
One gun-rights celebrity is rocker Ted Nugent, who recently wrote an open letter to Vice President JoeBiden. In his letter, Nugent argued that “gun-free zones” are really “modern killing fields” and theyshould be banned. Nugent also argued that concealed-carry permits should be authorized for qualifiedcitizens, including school officials, so that they can “protect themselves, their loved ones and innocents.”
He’s right. We need to make the argument back to those who seek to ban guns, and we need to drivehome the point that gun massacres have been and will continue to be ended by good guys with guns.Lives can be saved by teachers, fellow shoppers, security guards, and off-duty police officers who have agun when a bad person shows up and starts shooting.
Demand a plan? The plan is obvious: get more guns into the hands of good people so that they can stopthe bad guys who will always be able to get a gun. It is time we acknowledge this.