Saturday, November 28, 2009

Nope, Not Just Me.

In a post last week, I'ld mentioned that I've seen a significant uptick in 'Rightwing Extremist Militia' type stories on TV shows and 9badly) made for TV movies. Kaveman then crawled out from under the trailer w/ a copy of the Jan. '04 edition of America's 1st Freedom that had an article, Advise and Decieve, about the Joyce Foundation funding a group whose purpose was to push for guns to be shown in a bad light in the media.

Let's take a look at some of the EIC's 'recomendations' on how they do this and some of the examples the article highlighted:

Recommendation: consider exploring a gun dealer's or gun supplier's remorse about the harm done by someone to whom he or she funished a firearm.

Example: In the movie Liberty Stands Still, a character played by Wesley Snipes threatens to murder a woman named Liberty Wallace, whose company manufactured the firearm used to kill Snipes' daughter. Snipes tells Liberty she can die a hero by revealing her company's dubious business practices and political affiliations; threatened w/ death, liberty attempts to reconcile her past "misdeeds".

Recommendation: Consider giving an account of a family's lawsuit against a gun dealer or manufacturer for supplying a gun that a criminal used to murder their loved one.

Example: Though John Grisham's book was about a juror attempting to barter a decision for cash in a tobacco lawsuit, the movie Runaway Jury is an anti-gun fairy tale focusing on a lawsuit brought by a widow against a gun manufacturer.

I've actually had a person cite that movie as factual in a debate.

Recommendation: Consider using gun safety posters in the background on appropriate sets.

Example: Though the Lethal Weapon series could rightly be described as the pinnacle of shoot-em-up cinema, Lethal Weapon 4 featured anti-NRA posters crowding the background in a scene inside a police station.

Recommendation: Demonstrate parents making gun safety inquiries of other households where their children visit, asking about storage, accessibility and so on.

The article does not list an example but I caught an episode of the short lived series "The Education of Max Bickford" where the main character, played by Richard Dreyfuss, forbade his son to play w/ a neighbor who lets the boys plink at cans.

There are multiple other 'Tips' made including showing 'cool' kids make negative remarks about guns, regurgitate Joyce Foundation provided statistics in scripts, etc.

Then there's also classic examples of movies and the media blatantly fabricating information about guns like the Glock 17 in Die Hard 2 being able to defeat airport screeners and a 'Teflon Bullet" in Lethal Weapon 3 (that series again) penetrating several inches of steel plating. All legal for sale to those accident prone civilians.

I bring this up again since the other night the wife turned on one of those truly awful ghost finding shows and the thing was set in an abandoned WWII era Remington Arms factory where a few people died in accidents (7 people were an 'epic' number of deaths) . The hosts kept going on and on about the 'hundreds of thousands of people' who died because of the products designed for death and all the 'negative' energy of the place. A question during an interview of a former employee.... "Was it like being in Hell working here?"

It didn't stay on long.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had wanted to see that show, only because I currently live a few miles away from that old munitions factory. After reading a review in the local paper, I didn't bother watching. Turn-off quote from review: "In these buildings, they made things that killed people!” gushes Goodwin. “... This is where violence was manufactured, where violence was sown, where violence was reaped!”

Chas said...

I watched the movie "Gun Crazy" from 1949 last night. It was written by blacklisted communist, Dalton Trumbo, who had also written "Johnny Got His Gun". The commies have been propagandizing us for a long time. Good movie though, very well done, I recommend it.

hazmat said...

I watch Law and Order SVU quite a bit and have seen the anti-gun posters in the backgrounds of several scenes. Of course they always discourage the lowly victims of the crimes depicted of actually doing anything about them and have prosecuted those that have.

On the other side of the argument, I would like to bring up an episode of "The Unit" where one of the wives was attacked by a stalker at the radio station where she worked. One of the other wives had a CCW in her purse and used it to successfully bring about a happy ending for the good guys, even though the station manager was pissing his pants about her having it.

Mike Gallo said...

Actually, that episode of The Unit was even better than that. The anti-gun hippy station manager is the one who retrieves the gun and scares off the bad guy, having his cathartic moment and realizeing the error of his prior thinking on the matter.

There's also another great episode with Snake Doctor (the actor that does the car insurance commercials) and his daughter camping, where the daughter uses a gun to kill a snake that was going to bite her dad, and then his daughter takes a gun from her dad for protection on her way home (he leaves her in the forest to get home herself as a character building exercise). He finds out she took it after he admonishes her for hitchhiking, as it is dangerous, and she tells him she wasn't concerned because she was armed and prepared to defend herself.