Home Opinion A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

by alexis

It saddens me to post in response to such a horrific occurrence as the mass shooting in Connecticut. However, this occurrence brings up issues of national importance that we all should be contemplating, so I thought it would be worth writing out my contribution to the discourse here.

I just directed a short that has a gun; a tranquilizer-dart-shooting air pistol, but a gun nonetheless. As we were shooting the scene the weekend before this tragedy, there was some discussion about the “cool factor” of a gun in a movie. I’m being honest. As outraged as I’ve been that yet another mass gun murder has taken place, I’m still putting guns on screen. Because they’re cool. Because people like them in these morality plays we create and call entertainment. And because it served my narrative purpose.

While I fall short of calling for an outright ban on all guns, I have been fairly vocal on social networking sites where I participate that I believe gun ownership should be subject to increased regulation. I use car ownership as my model, as it requires the training and testing needed to obtain a license, and regulation to the extent that certain infractions (repeated drunk driving, for example) rescinds your right to drive. Furthermore, you don’t get to drive anything you want, your license entitles you to drive a certain type of vehicle, and that vehicle needs to conform to certain standards to be considered “street legal.”

My rationale is this; I’m not looking to take cars away, I just want to make sure that people who own cars know how to use them, that the cars they’re driving are safe for the purpose of transportation, and that their license for use is dependent on their behavior with their vehicle. Vehicles are dangerous, and we want drivers to be responsible.

Likewise with guns. Guns have one purpose, to put a bullet into a target. Whether that target is a clay pigeon, a deer, or a person. Their inherent danger both to their owners (accidents are not unknown) and to others I believe demands the same level of training and oversight as ownership of an automobile. And I don’t want to hear about voluntary measures from anyone who’s not willing to let driver training and testing for licensing be voluntary as well.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that firearms with automatic actions, assault weapons, and large magazines are necessary for general civilian use. If you need a magazine with 15 rounds to hunt deer, you might be doing it wrong. And you should not require a Glock with 26 rounds to fend off an assailant; if so I sure as hell don’t want to be around while you’re doing it.

We used a dummy prop in my movie, and the logistics of the effects meant that our actress didn’t actually have to point the fake gun at anyone at all, just at a green screen. Consequently, little oversight was necessary beyond me taking the time to go through the motions of confirming the fakeness of the gun, confirming or unloading the chamber of our fake gun, and making sure the darts being handled were properly capped.

However, were it a production necessitating actual firearms firing actual blanks around other actual actors, we would have required an arms master, multiple levels of checks and safety drills, and our insurance premiums for the shoot would have gone up.

Which leads to my actual question—what if gun owners were required to carry the same kind of liability insurance that car owners and filmmakers need to carry?

Regardless of who you are and what your track record is, if you’re a responsible filmmaker, you should carry liability insurance. There are dozens of things that can go wrong, and all kinds of ways that your cast and crew members can be hurt. If you don’t carry insurance beyond what your rental agreements require, you are being irresponsible. My small shoot, three days of principal photography, ended up carrying a burden of $1900 worth of insurance overall. I gladly paid, because I wanted to make sure that if the unthinkable went wrong and anything bad happened, the right thing would be done.

Insurance is a free market solution. Let private insurers handle gun owner liability, setting premiums using the same metrics they use for other insurable activities. If you’re uninsurable, then you don’t get to have a gun, because you probably shouldn’t.

As far as I’m concerned, this would be a ratification of the personal responsibility borne by gun owners. If you’re responsible, your premiums will be low, and your motivation to properly store and lock up your dangerous tool will be high.

Furthermore, this insurance would provide a fund to deal with the inevitable accidents and homicides that we in the United States are declaring we’re willing to accept as a consequence of wide-spread gun ownership. Make no mistake, if we are willing to accept civilian ownership of guns, we are saying that we accept the accompanying accidents and homicides committed as a result.

If the general consensus remains that gun ownership is, in fact, worth that price, then we owe it to ourselves to create a comprehensive, non-optional culture of gun safety and oversight, and to limit the potential for mass fatalities by setting realistic limits on what can be owned.

Ranchers, hunters, and enthusiasts can continue to keep those guns deemed acceptable for civilian availability. There are many legitimate uses, and people who need them. But if you’re a gun owner who’s against gun controls, you need to own up to the hazards these tools present, and you especially need to own up to the fact that not everyone is as responsible in their gun ownership as you are.

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3 comments

Dan Miller December 15, 2012 - 6:19 pm

Why don’t we regulate Hollywood’s glorifying of all the guts and glory of cold blooded killing? Seems to me that guns were much less regulated when I was a kid and mass shootings were unheard of. When is society going to come to the realization that when you divorce God from society, you get the fruit of a Godless society.

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Alexis December 15, 2012 - 8:43 pm

Beyond the first amendment implications of the regulation of storytelling, to be honest, I actually agree with your questioning of glorified Hollywood violence. I tend to have a problem with stories that present realistic violence without emotional consequence. I believe that narrative violence, like other human experiences, can be instructive if presented within an emotional and intellectual context. Since I’m a big believer in underlying themes in narrative, I think it’s fair game to use every emotional tool in the box, love, hate, sex, violence, friendship, betrayal, etcetera, in the service of a story that seeks a certain emotional honesty, even within genre pieces such as science fiction, crime, thrillers, horror, and so on. If there’s an interesting point to be made, terrible things can be presented responsibly.

However, a lack of context, and horrible violence presented solely for entertainment, is something I find troubling, and a reason I don’t typically watch a lot of horror movies. In particular, I confess that I find the genre of “torture porn” particularly unwatchable. I’m not going to suggest that such movies should be banned, but I have no interest in either making or patronizing them.

With regards to the notion that “divorcing god from society” somehow engenders more violence, I believe there are plenty of societies around the world with dominant religious beliefs within the population that are rife with far greater levels of violence then we experience, so I’m not persuaded that secularism in the United States has anything to do with anything.

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bradbell.tv December 16, 2012 - 7:49 am

” In the 18 years before the gun law reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards. ”
Source:
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365.full

The most shocking thing about atheism is that morality doesn’t disappear with religion. Religion frames morality and impresses the value of morals upon us. One could even argue that religion exists to maintain a moral framework. Thus, it is always shocking for someone raised with religion to realise that religion does not *generate* morality. Nor is it necessary to be moral. Morality is independent of religion – although religion is not independent of morality. Nor is atheism. Atheism is just as moral as religion. In fact, there is some evidence that morality is actually innate. We are talking about a very basic interpretation of morality, regarding murder, for example. (In no human society has it ever been cool to kill one of your own. There is war, and also institutional killing (death penalty, sacrificing virgins), which are acceptable forms of institutionalised group murder. But as an individual, murder is universally punished.)

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