Guns, Hollywood and the Second Amendment - Part 2

Henry Payne

Since our recent post about guns and media hypocrisy, a few things are getting clearer.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that the National Rifle Association is more popular than the entertainment industry.

• Forty-one percent of adults see the NRA -- the nation's top gun lobby -- in a positive light, while 34 percent view it in a negative light.
• By comparison, just 24 percent have positive feelings about the entertainment industry, and 39 percent have negative ones.

The Journal News in Westchester County, New York, has taken down its controversial online map with the names and addresses of legal gun permit holders after the New York State Legislature passed a new law making such information confidential and protected from the Freedom of Information Act. Yet, publisher Janet Hasson delivered an unapologetic and sanctimonious defense of the paper's decision to publish the map. A quick scan of the readers' comments section makes clear no one's buying it.

And, Anthony Lane, the film critic at The New Yorker, wrote about Hollywood's complicity in gun violence. Lane explains that the film Gangster Squad deleted its scene of a shootout in a movie theater after the real carnage at the screening of The Black Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and then the film Jack Reacher was delayed one month after the school shooting in Sandy Hook. Lane calls these decisions "respectable and responsible." Read more of his Hollywood apologia here:

"To claim that all due respect has been paid, however, or that all ethical responsibilities have been fulfilled, would be disingenuous. The issue of screen violence carries far less weight, in such fathomless horrors, than that of gun control; the connection between what a disturbed and resentful young man used to watch, or play on his computer, and what he then wreaks in public with an assault weapon wouldn't matter if he couldn't lay his hands on such a weapon in the first place. Yet the connection, however oblique, exists. You can argue that evil will seek a blueprint and find a way, but we are still obliged, I think, to pass beyond the pathology of a madman and pose a vaster and no less vexing question. What does it mean for the majority of us, the nonviolent millions, that year after year, we should observe such a rising flood of fictional savage acts that, after a while, we barely notice or mind? And is there anything that a filmmaker could or should do to stem the flow?"