I was taken a bit aback by that story, not remembering that commercial. Going to you tube and hearing the commercial I remembered it vaguely. Equating menthol tobacco with the great out of doors is quite a stretch.
I was thinking of investigating how did they come to put menthol into cigarettes, but then Winston-Salem the town caught my attention and took me to wiki, where I was surprised to see that they had a quarter of a million people. Also surprised to hear that it was founded by the Moravian Brethren, and was just beginning to read about the Moravian Brethren when something came up on the radio.
As I was writing this a story came out of NPR about that shooting on the set of that Rust movie. My first reaction to this whole thing was you have this whole crew who are pretty well-paid and all, the only thing they have to do, the only thing, is keep a gun with live ammo off the set. Does not sound that hard.
This particular crew, just from what I have heard so far, seem to be a group of jagoffs. I am certainly not talking about Beagles cradling Old Betsy in the deer blind and his ilk, but some folks just get giddy around guns, and some giddy people are drawn to guns, you know like those guys who don't hunt and live in posh gated communities who turn out to have like 10 AR-15's. Nobody, even in Buffalo, has 10 snow shovels, why do folks have 10 guns?
See, what I am thinking is on paper the system they had sounds pretty good and sufficient. I guess you could add extra layers to it, and that would make it even safer but you are always going to have that human factor that is going to fuck things up.
And now there are some folks wanting to ban all guns from all sets, period. This sounds a little extreme to me, but then what is the harm? How would our movie experience be diminished knowing that that actor who we know is not a real person who is in a place that is a movie set, is holding a gun that cannot hold bullets?
And even as I am thinking that there is a guy on the radio saying that there is nothing like a real gun and you could just tell, could just tell that it wasn't real and then the whole movie would go to shit.
I am kind of wondering why this story is such a big fucking deal. People get killed making movies often enough, generally through some stunt that goes wrong. Okay, stunts are complicated and stunt people know the dangers, but in this case it seems to be that it is one colossal fuck up by some really stupid or nutty guy, so that makes it more outrageous. But there is something even bigger than that. it involves a gun.
Right now the whole gun control issue is way down on the list. There hasn't been a really big mass shooting since Orlando in 2016, and there is so much other shit going on. But I wonder if, just for sport, just as a reflex action, we might see a proxy fight with the anti gun people insisting no real guns, not even those rendered harmless on movie sets, and the pro gun forces saying the second amendment calls for all guns everywhere, and darkly threatening that taking guns off the sets is a slippery slope that will end up with them coming for Old Betsy.
Maybe cooler heads will prevail, but how likely is that?
No comments:
Post a Comment