Hollywood tries a new role — gun safety advocacy
Everything I knew as a child about guns I learned from Hollywood. In countless movies and police dramas, I watched people handling and using guns. Even Saturday morning, cartoons had beloved characters that were regularly strapped, like outlaw Yosemite Sam and rabbit hunting enthusiast Elmer Fudd.
So at age 10, when I stumbled onto my father’s US Army-issued .45 while snooping in his nightstand, I inherently understood how to remove the clip and put on the safety so that I wouldn’t accidentally shoot anything. And the only reason I knew how to do those things was because I had absorbed, without realizing it, lessons about firearms from Hollywood’s normalization — bordering on indoctrination — of guns as cool and fun.
In June 2022, weeks after separate gun massacres at a Buffalo supermarket and a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school killed 31 people and injured others, more than 250 Hollywood creatives — including Shonda Rhimes, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, and Jimmy Kimmel — signed an open letter that implored “writers, directors and producers to be mindful of on-screen gun violence and model gun safety best practices.”
“As America’s storytellers, our goal is primarily to entertain, but we also acknowledge that stories have the power to effect change,” read the letter, organized by the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence. “Cultural attitudes toward smoking, drunk driving, seatbelts and marriage equality have all evolved due in large part to movies’ and TV’s influence. It’s time to take on gun safety.”
The letter was also clear: “We are not asking anyone to stop showing guns on screen.”
What the entertainment industry is trying to do is highlight common-sense gun safety measures on screen.
On a recent episode of the CBS copa-ganda drama, “S.W.A.T.,” the lead character, Hondo, played by Shemar Moore, comes home after a long day. As he talks to his wife, he walks to a closet and stores his service firearm in a gun safe that can only be opened with his fingerprint. The camera lingers on the moment, so that there’s no confusion about exactly what Hondo is doing.
That scene is the work of Brady United, a gun-reform advocacy group, and its “Show Gun Safety” initiative with Hollywood studios to incorporate scenes of responsible gun ownership into its storylines. In a recent CNN segment, “S.W.A.T.” showrunner Andrew Dettmann said the point of that small moment was to portray safe gun storage “as a routine part” of the character’s life, especially because [the character] “now has a toddler in the house.”
That CNN story aired days after James Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with a mass shooting by his son, Ethan, who killed four of his classmates and wounded several others at his Oxford, Mich., high school in 2021. In a separate trial last month, Ethan’s mother, Jennifer Crumbley, was also found guilty on the same charges as her husband.
The Crumbley verdicts are historic because they mark the first time parents have been held criminally culpable for a mass shooting carried out by their child. But these trials also put safe gun storage in the spotlight as never before. One of the prosecution’s key points focused on James Crumbley’s negligence in securely storing the semiautomatic handgun he purchased for his then-15year-old son days before the school shooting.
“Securing the gun is the whole thing,” the jury’s foreman told the Detroit Free Press after the verdict. “It could have been a safe, a cable lock, a trigger lock. It all could have been used at some point.”
Now gun safety may slowly become Hollywood’s thing. It’s a subtle but necessary change. The Show Gun Safety initiative also recommends no guns in children’s programming and reconsideration as to when guns are necessary in adult-oriented shows. But no one should expect cop shows or action films without shootouts. The entertainment and firearm industries are much too intertwined for such a drastic move.
In 1997’s “Jackie Brown,” writer-director Quentin Tarantino — one of the most gun-giddy filmmakers of the past 30 years — used a brief scene to dissect Hollywood’s influence on firearms when a gun dealer explained how his buyers are drawn to the guns they see in their favorite movies.
Is Hollywood undergoing a gun reform reckoning? Perhaps it’s better not to call it that since this nation is notoriously bad at reckoning for past sins. Let’s call it a start. But the TV and film industry, which has allowed many of its shows and movies to serve as default infomercials for firearms, has a long way to go to help make gun safes as ubiquitous as guns.