I was hoping to make it to the new year without doing this…I did kind of promise the wife I would spend less time on the computer during the holidays. But since she left for a half day of work, the kids are still asleep, and I am already up…I can do this and not feel like I am being a bad guy about it. Yay.
So here we are the 31st of December on the verge of the fiscal cliff. Do we go over it, do we not, who knows. While we are teetering on the edge of sequestration and some belt-tightening, we are still reeling from the mass shootings and mass murders this year, all 14 of them. Of course, the Newtown shooting is still fresh in our mind, but apparently it is so fresh and touching in the minds of our Hollywood elite they had to make a black and white video showing a bunch of violence that occurs everyday in America and around the world and beg all of us to go to our government and “demand a plan” for ending gun violence and gun ownership and the use of guns by pretty much everyone.
Wow…um, the Hollywood elite telling us once again how we should feel about their politics. Fabulous. Well one internetian (I don’t know what to call these people) went out and created his own video, spicing in with the tinsel town fools crying for some kind of social, anti-gun action all the images of these exact people shooting their way across the silver screen, murdering person after person. I loaded the clean version on here for your enjoyment.
Now some of you will say, but gun kill people. Hollywood actors are just giving the Americans what they want, movies and video games don’t make you kill, blah, blah, blah, etc. You know, that may be right, stupid but arguably right, but does this level of violence not desensitize people in the long run.
I had a friend once tell me about a movie he saw in the theater, American Psycho, where in the killer was busy murdering a homeless person and the audience did nothing, but when the killer murdered the homeless man’s dog, the audience got vocal with shock and disappointment. So the imaginary death of a dog is worth more than the imaginary death of a man….and Hollywood, an industry built on sex, violence, and lies wants us to listen to them when it comes time to act holier than thou? Well ef them. They are all elitist hypocrites, the kind of people who travel with armed body guards to keep them safe from the little, unclean people they look down on. I suppose what they want is gun control for the masses, not the few at the top, not the 1% of themselves as it were.
You only come out and make a video after a national tragedy, you are only engaging in a publicity stunt and that makes me sick. There were over 500 murders in Chicago this year, in 2012, and no star made a video for that. Where is the love for Rahm-land. The latest figures state that in the United States there are 10.2 gun deaths for every 100,000 people. That is roughly 32,000 people a year. Where is your video oh Hollywood? I guess raw numbers don’t evoke the same kind of manipulative emotions you want to tackle.
But wait, you take out the suicides and the unintentional gun deaths and the number drops to 3.7 gun murders in America for every 100,000 people. Yes, there are many countries above that number and many countries below that number, you could argue that the UK with its stringent gun control has fewer gun crimes but you could offset that with the fact that Switzerland, where every male is required to serve in the military and then keep an automatic weapon in his home with ammunition also has a very low rate of gun murders. Weird. This is not about guns, it is about education about access, about equilibrium.
Guns are part of the unique culture of America, spend some time learning about them, becoming comfortable with them and having them everywhere and given to everyone. There is your solution, flood the country with guns, make sure everyone has a gun. When everyone has one, people will be a little more thoughtful about taking one out, waving it around, and trying to kill people with it. Then America wins.
Oh, and Happy New Year to all of you.