We’re all accustomed to seeing Hollywood’s big names espousing the liberal-progressive line, whatever the topic may be. From abortion to border security, from “racism” to the general subject of “Trump,” actors, directors, and producers like to position themselves at the tip of the spear.
The stories Hollywood tells don’t always take fictional license in order to serve the progressive-left line. In stories that aren’t focused on abortion as the issue, for example, producers actually do know that abortion is a not casual, easy decision, and that audiences have a majority preference: they root for choosing life. We simply don’t live in a world in which audiences will stick around for fake social conditions like “mainstreamed,” routine, morally neutral abortion.
Where reality runs too counter to the leftist line, Hollywood tends to simply not show reality. TV dramas, especially cop shows, give us a lot of stories about illegal migrants encountering law enforcement in America’s big cities. Those dramas never show what it looks like for small border towns when America’s southern border goes unpoliced, or how it affects mostly poor communities, in cities small and big, when hundreds or thousands of people in the country illegally concentrate among them trying to evade law enforcement.
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Then there are guns. Hollywood shows guns in use all the time. The industry’s most marketable genres can’t function without guns. Producers, screenwriters, actors: all of them know that guns and the use of force are essential to public order. That’s just reality.
Not only do we see guns pulled on screen all the time; we see them used. Triggers are pulled, noises are put in the sound track. Actors have to look like they’re using live guns, or actually being hit by rounds from them. Good guys, story protagonists we’re supposed to root for, use guns. Bad guys are accurately depicted as having and using them (although sometimes falsely depicted as using guns never found in real-life crimes; e.g., actual machine guns).
Hollywood isn’t really anti-gun. In fact, leftism isn’t anti-gun. Progressive leftists are fine with guns, if they’re being used to provide security for leftist celebrities and Democratic politicians.
What leftists, including Hollywood leftists, are against is you having guns.
So Hollywood puts lots and lots of guns in movies and TV stories, being used by good guys and bad — but then adds verbiage in the scripts to the effect that the people who know guns best (like police officers and military special forces) don’t really like them. These experts think guns are lame and morally misguided, and the public is better off without them.
In the video below, John Lott shows that that’s the opposite of what police officers really think. His video also makes it clear (if not explicit) that the anti-gun verbiage inserted in the dialogue is a sort of indulgence-buying ritual: the constant purchase of mitigation for “sin” constantly committed — i.e., showing guns in use for indispensable reasons.
Here’s how they do it. (H/t, with partial transcript: Daily Wire)
Hollywood both loves guns and wants them banned. Their scripts ignorantly smear gun owners, @JohnRLottJr points out here: pic.twitter.com/XE0jEy0iHk
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) September 5, 2019
