Apparently, hoplophobia is a genuine problem in Hollywood, according to the next panel, which discussed the entertainment industry’s bias against guns.
Gifford, the producer who developed the film “Waco: The Rules of Engagement,” returned with this panel and said bias in Hollywood is “not a very funny subject.”He called the story of Waco a tale of “mass murder of American citizens who just wanted to be left alone.” He blasted the report on Waco by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as bogus, and said the anti-firearm bias in Hollywood takes many different forms.
The most subtle approach is to slip in anti-gun characters, or dialogue, into popular television shows. This has been going on since “Hawaii Five-O” and continued to include a character in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” who carried tomahawks “because guns are bad.”
S.S. Wilson, originator and producer of the “Tremors” movie series, asserted that the bias against guns in the news media is more harmful than the bias in Hollywood. Reminding the audience that Hollywood also brought us the “Dirty Harry” series, he insisted that “political agendas generally don’t drive the movies.”
He assured gun activists that there are some pro-gun producers, directors and actors in Hollywood who are “working in another way, a more subtle way” to shed a more favorable light on gunowners.
Rounding out the discussion, novelist J. Neil Schulman recalled how he was professionally blacklisted from a job he wanted as a writer on a popular television series dealing with the law practice. It happened because he wrote an Op-Ed piece for The Los Angeles Times that discussed a restaurant massacre that never happened, in Anniston, AL, in 1991. That was the incident in which an armed citizen happened to be present when gunmen robbed a restaurant and were herding patrons and employees into a back room, apparently to murder them. The armed man drew his gun and shot the robbers, wounding one and killing the other.
“I never got called in to write for that series,” he stated.
Schulman also distributed copies of anti-gun guidelines prepared for the entertainment industry.
Disguising Gun Bans
Peter Buxton, chairman of the Coalition Against Prohibition, and Jeff Knox, director of operations for the Firearms Coalition, provided an inside look at how anti-gunners are disguising gun bans and confiscations as public safety measures.
Buxton told the audience about “money and lies.” He said the city of San Francisco is “the model for the whole West Coast.”
“The liberals are taking over the big cities and they’re leaving us the backwoods and the smaller populations,” he said. “California is the front line.”
He went into detail on Proposition H, the citywide gun ban initiative that voters were to decide on Nov. 8. Buxton also said San Francisco has “hypocrisy on a massive scale.” Only the elites want to be able to carry guns, and Buxton said one of the top anti-gunners in the state legislature carries a gun, allegedly claiming it is because he “gets regular death threats from the NRA.”
Buxton revealed that his organization had been working throughout the summer with gay gunowners, and that in their campaign against the gun ban initiative, had pushed the idea that the city would wind up pretty much a city where “all the guns are owned by cops, criminals and Republicans.”
Knox greeted the audience with the opening line coined by his father, the late Neal Knox, by announcing, “Good morning, Gun Lobby!” For a moment, many in the audience seemed to sense something different, as this was the first GRPC in memory from which Neal Knox was absent. He did participate in the 2004 Washington, DC, conference, just months before he passed away following a battle with cancer.The younger Knox told the audience that, “you control your destiny and you control the destiny of the future of this country.”
He said the loss of his father, who died in January, “leaves a huge hole in the gun rights movement.”
Turning his attention to Louisiana, Knox said the “most important lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that state and local politicians believe that they have the right to confiscate your firearms. They believe they have the right to tell you (that) you may not be armed.”
Knox said the media must believe that it is okay to confiscate guns because he had heard a Washington, DC, talk show host give the idea passing approval as a method of getting people to leave the city during the evacuation.
Knox reminded the audience that no gun ban ever reduced crime. He also noted that “gun rights are civil rights, gun rights are personal protection rights.”
“We have the inalienable right, the natural right to protect ourselves,” Knox commented. “If we have the right to defend ourselves then we have the right to the means to defend ourselves.”
Legal Affairs
Gottlieb returned to the microphone for the final discussion on the conference agenda, detailing the current state of affairs on the legal front.
He told the audience that newly-appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts “will probably rule on the Second Amendment as an individual right” if a case is ever brought before the high court. However, Gottlieb also predicted that Roberts “may pretty much stick with what the 5th Circuit (in New Orleans) did, saying that while it’s an individual right, not all gun control laws are unconstitutional.”
Gottlieb was favorably impressed that Roberts was reasonably well versed in significant gun cases and the difference in the interpretation of the Second Amendment that now exist between the 5th and 9th Circuit courts.
“My feelings are that he’s probably a little bit better on the issue for us than (the late William) Rehnquist, who he’s replacing,” Gottlieb suggested.
He then explained what had occurred with the New Orleans case, and what was still to be done. When authorities began seizing guns, Gottlieb said, there was no due process and gunowners were not given receipts for their firearms. There was no equal protection, because wealthy people were not disarmed and in some cases, were allowed to have their own armed security.
The more serious concern, he said, was that all the gun grabs amounted to illegal search and seizure, because the police had no legal authority under federal or state laws to confiscate firearms.
Both SAF and the NRA looked at the situation and agreed that it would be better to combine their efforts. What resulted was a quickly-granted temporary restraining order, with both organizations seeking a permanent injunction. For Gottlieb, the lawsuit and its outcome were sweet revenge, as he noted that New Orleans, under former anti-gun Mayor Marc Morial, was the first city to file a lawsuit against the firearms industry in 1999.
Once the SAF/NRA lawsuit won the restraining order, he said the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Department began returning guns to their owners within a few hours. The city of New Orleans, however, remained adamant that it had not seized any firearms.
If the case goes to the 5th Circuit on appeal, Gottlieb predicted a good reception by that court because of its previous position on the Second Amendment as written in the Emerson ruling. Any ruling from that court might further strengthen the individual right interpretation.
At the time of the conference, there was no way of predicting how the San Francisco gun ban initiative would fare with voters in that city. Gottlieb assured the audience that SAF would once again be back in court, as it was 20 years ago when then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, now an anti-gun United States Senator from California, rammed through the handgun ban.
That ban was overturned by the court because it violated the state’s preemption statute. California’s constitution does not have a right to keep and bear arms amendment, Gottlieb noted. He recalled that “every judge in California who touched that case ruled in our favor.” He was hopeful that if the ban passed, SAF and the NRA would team up once again, as they did on the New Orleans case, and mount a strong legal challenge.
The conference closed after the report of the Resolutions Committee and adoption of several resolutions by those attending .
While the annual GRPC’s are co-sponsored by SAF and CCRKBA, additional funding support was also provided this year by: California Rifle & Pistol Association; GunBookStore.com; The New Gun Week; Marathon USA; Microsoft® Gun Club; National Shooting Sports Foundation; DPMS Panther Arms; Sturm, Ruger; The Robert W. Dannelly Living Trust; KeepAndBearArms.com; H&R Firearms; MBNA America; Merril Press; National Rifle Association; Washington Arms Collectors; Women & Guns magazine; Marlin Firearms, and the Hunting & Shooting Sports Heritage Fund.
Next year’s Gun Rights Policy Conference will be held Sept. 22-24 in Charlotte, NC.