Ammo & Gear Reviews

Hollywood: Anti-Second Amendment Movie Bombs

Harold Hutchison Freelance Writer
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It’s no secret that Hollywood, like many of the elites in the Acela Corridor and the Left Coast, is not a fan of our Second Amendment rights. Look at how often those who favor gun control get portrayed positively.

Well, America’s now seeing through Hollywood’s nonsense – and it shows at the box office. Miss Sloane was supposed to be a cinematic hit on the so-called “gun lobby” and it brought some serious acting talent to the fray. Two-time Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain was the biggest name, but you had long-time Law & Order star Sam Waterston (who has a Golden Globe and a SAG Award of his own) in this film as well.

Yet the film is officially a box-office bomb, drawing in only $1.9 million last weekend, against a $13 million budget. Ms. Chastain received a Golden Globe nomination for her unseen-by-most-of-America performance, though – her fourth (with one win). The foreign press and the critics have generally lavished praise on the film. But the film bombed anyhow.

Why does it bomb? Because any good piece of fiction (and yes, whether its Star Wars or a political drama, most movies are fiction – even the documentaries) has to be plausible enough to the person who is trying to entertain him or herself to suspend disbelief. The problem is, when you know the facts about the incidents used to push gun control, you just can’t suspend disbelief. Not when they typical Hollywood plot involves the “gun lobby” as the villain.

For instance, as the total number of guns in circulation has neared 400 million, violent crime has dropped for the most part. AR-15s fly off shelves in the four years since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, but the number of murders committed with rifles of all types (not just AR-15s) went from 332 in 2011 to 298 in 2012. The numbers dropped further from 2013 (285) to 2014 (258) to 2015 (252). Look at that trend. When you consider that each year, as many as a million AR-15s were sold, it should be obvious that more AR-15s does not equal more killings.

Furthermore, in many of these mass shootings (or terrorist attacks), the killer either passed background checks or broke the laws that purportedly would stop the massacre. The terrorists in Paris and San Bernardino broke the laws. The mass shooter at Sandy Hook stole the firearms in question. The killer in the Aurora movie theater passed a background check. So did the terrorist responsible for the attack at Fort Hood. Yet we’re supposed to believe the answer is to pass “universal background checks” to stop future attacks.

To top it off, many people also know that what laws are in place never get used. Chris Brown, for instance, should be facing a host of federal gun charges. But those laws went unused, even though it would have been a slam-dunk conviction for a halfway competent federal prosecutor. And one just has to look at Project Exile’s results in Richmond, Virginia as even the New York Times reported in 1999.

Face it, Ms. Chastain. If you wanted a realistic political drama, Miss Sloane was not the film for you. Unless, of course, Miss Sloane had been written about a lobbyist working on behalf of at least five million Americans who believe in the Second Amendment, facing off against fat cat billionaires like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda is no way to go through life.