Video by Hollywood stars about guns followed by the reality check video

Don’t you wish sometimes that you never… I mean never… saw or heard Hollywood stars when they weren’t actually in a show or movie?

Some of these people are getting into the gun-control issue. Strikes me as a bit hypocritical.

The original…

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How does that stack up with how they make their money? (WARNING: Some of the images in this video are pretty awful, but they make the point pretty clear.)

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What are the image in movies and TV shows – and video games – doing to the minds of our children and young people.

Maybe that’s what they should be talking about?

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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17 Comments

  1. Katheryn says:

    That. Was. Awesome.

  2. PA mom says:

    It greatly annoys me how much violence is in movies. Completely unnecessary violence, that makes little sense in a plot, in fact takes up the space that used to contain a plot, back when people knew how to write a story.
    It is true of adult movies, and doubly true of children’s movies.

  3. The incessant raw violence in these movies and in the games must be severely numbing.

  4. jflare says:

    I’ll give them credit for this much: They didn’t include demands from any actors who’ve been best known for “shoot-em-up” movies. Outside that though….

    If they REALLY want to curb gun violence, maybe they ought to more firmly emphasize prayer, contemplation, and learning something besides ethnic rubbish.
    ..Or maybe they could assist the NRA with building more gun ranges so more people could see what REALLY happens to this or that when you fire a gun.
    ..Or perhaps they could take a few people with a camera crew to a gun range, fire different forms of ammo at a few human-like targets, then comment on how “That COULD be YOU” in the wrong circumstances. Run a PSA like that to make people think.

    On a somewhat related note, I once owned a copy of “Commando”, an early(ish) Arnold Schwarzenegger film. I wound up being rid of it because, as thin a plot as the Terminator movies had, Commando had even less.
    I literally grew weary of watching a gun shoot-out and blasting things every 5 minutes.

    ..’Course I s’pose military service might’ve dimmed my taste for random violence to a degree too…..

  5. Cathy says:

    When it happens in real life, they all cry tragedy and demand the government takes all the guns away. When they do it in a movie, they all cry art and entertainment and demand the government protect their free speech.

  6. cyejbv says:

    Fr Z said “Don’t you wish sometimes that you never… I mean never… saw or heard Hollywood stars when they weren’t actually in a show or movie?” and I -sort of- have to disagree, which I rarely do.

    I wish every single one of us would neither see nor hear (most of ) them EVER -particularly at the box office.

    The money they make every time we see a film or buy an i tune or whatever is like feeding the guy who keeps the dragon. If the keeper starts to suffer, so does the beast. I refuse to give a dime at the box office for almost every film that comes out, and I don’t care how great it is. I am so tired of uninformed and immoral actors using their fame to lobby! Besides I can wait for Red Box, and it’s a personal source of pride that I just saw “Avatar” a few months ago.
    Having said that, Fr also wrote: “What are the image in movies and TV shows – and video games – doing to the minds of our children and young people” which is exactly-EXACTLY- right and precisely what people should be talking about- as they explain why they have boycotted Hollywood, as have I. :)

    We can’t be lazy about this. It’s a big deal, but to too many it doesn’t seem like it. ‘It’s just a TV show, it’s just a movie’ might go the refrain- but that thinking is wrong. That ad used celebrities- as opposed to say, UPS drivers- for a reason.

  7. stilicho says:

    Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

  8. Michelle F says:

    I’m so glad that someone made the fisk video!

    I grew up watching programs such as The Lone Ranger and The Rifleman in the 1970s, and even though there was plenty of gunplay in those programs, it was always confined to moral limits. Bad guys used weapons indiscriminately, and good guys only used weapons to stop the bad guys – and perhaps to hunt for dinner. I never saw any problem with the violence in those programs because it served a specific purpose.

    One day in the late 1990s, however, I was channel-surfing and came across Natural-Born Killers already in progress on Cinemax or HBO. I stopped to watch a few minutes of it simply because I was so horrified by what I saw. I wish I could say at what point I tuned-in, but Woody Harrelson was in the middle of killing someone with a slow-motion hail of bullets. Harrelson was wearing all white, and the camera shot was done from a low angle so that he looked like a god. I’m not exaggerating. I have never, ever seen such a glorification of violence in my life!

    I don’t know how we as a society got on this path, but I’m certain Hollywood is playing a major role in making murder a normal part of everyday life. Like an addict who needs ever-bigger hits and stronger drugs to achieve a high, American society needs more violence and gorier scenes in movies to feel the same rush from it. The ultimate rush, of course, is killing someone in real life, and this is something which growing numbers seem inclined to do.

    Perhaps we should start looking at this addiction to ultra-violence (to borrow a term from A Clockwork Orange) as an addiction as well as a moral failure, just as we consider being hooked on pornography an addiction as well as a moral failure.

  9. Legisperitus says:

    I’m glad somebody knew who all these people were and what films they had been in. I only recognized three or four.

  10. Christopher says:

    Ultra-violence is rather dominant in the video games of today, Warren Spector (designer of Epic Mickey series) spoke out and condemned it.

    God Bless.

  11. dominic1955 says:

    I also think its funny the someone like Beyonce appears in this stupid Goebbelsfilm with a shirt buttoned up to her neck. Gee…I don’t think dressing like a schoolmarm got you anywhere in the Biz, now did it?

    These people act in movies or TV shows that glorify “gun violence” and objectification of women and any manner of other things and then they go and put on their serious face as if they gave a hoot. They are, by and large, talentless money-whore hacks.

  12. Viva la Internet! The fact is, celebrities will always get lots of attention, and people will listen no matter how dumb their comments. Instead of wishing they’d only be seen in their movies/TV shows, or telling them to be quiet (for example, Laura Ingraham’s book “Shut Up and Sing”), the best tactic is to expose their ignorance and/or hypocrisy with clever web-based videos or commentary. Then pass it along, link to it, and share with everyone you know in the hopes it will go viral, just like this video did. Kudos to whoever invested a ton of time to create this one.
    “Be of good cheer!” (John 16:33)
    http://www.MerryCatholic.com

  13. MichaelJ says:

    I’m still bewildered why the opinions expressed by actors and actresses on any topic are given so much more credence than anyone else’s.
    Think about it for a moment. Their particular skill, on which their livelihood depends, is to make others believe something that is false. Given this, why would anyone believe what an actor says?

  14. Christopher says:

    Michael, it could be due to Pride, thinking they somehow have the power to influence a person’s decision. Frankly it’s nothing more than emotional rhetoric.

    God Bless.

  15. Ironic that those with armed bodyguards promote anti-gun sentiment.

  16. Johnno says:

    As a fan of videogames I do tend to stay far away from ultra violent ones.

    But games are not the problem. Neither are films. Rather the context does matter.

    WWII and SWAT games for example can shed light on relevant things about war and police work much like films like Saving Private Ryan can. It is true that one is far removed form the reality, but young boys are always playing ‘soldier’ and ‘cops and robbers’ and ‘lone ranger’ long before video games were invented and this can be a healthy thing for young boys to engage in, of course providing the differences between the good guys and bad guys is clear where good triumphs over evil through struggle.

    All the same, there are good games and bad games, just as there are good films and bad films and also those made for children and those for mature audiences. And the intensity of violence is debatable depending on the context and intent and target audience.

    I’m certain a good number of celebrities also don’t support Obama or gun control. This list of folks in this video here does however shed forth a hypocritical part of their message. The gun-control folks don’t very much know what they’re talking about, that much is clear. What they ideally want is something good and worthy, but the way they are going about it is impractical.

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