There was an episode of the TV show Night Court where Marion Ross comes in to the courtroom and pulls out a hand grenade. She was demanding that her husband be released from prison. In the course of the half hour of hijinks, the courtroom regulars figure out that she is talking about a character in a daytime soap opera. She had become so engrossed in the story that she no longer knew the difference between her real life and what she was watching on TV. Conveniently, during that same episode, there happened to be a TV crew recording the proceedings in the courtroom. Harry wisely set up a tape of himself talking to the confused woman. While she was engaged in a conversation with the pre-recorded judge he walked in the door shattering her fantasy world. (Leave a comment if you remember the hilarious interaction between her and Bull when she realizes her confusion.)
Recently, several people became very upset about an episode of “Game of Thrones.” In this episode there was a brutal rape. Several people took to social media to declare that they were so outraged about this gratuitous scene that they would never watch the show again. How dare the producers of this show degrade women so much by depicting this terrible scene. One person that joined the outrage machine was Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). She tweeted her disgust and declared herself “Game of Thrones” free from that day forward. OK, that’s all well and good. If a rape scene makes people want to abandon their TV show fandom, that’s great.
Here’s the thing that seems odd. On the same day Senator McCaskill tweeted her outrage about the fictional rape of a fictional character the New York Times ran a story about the systematic rapes of real women by Boko Haram. These women are rounded up, threatened, degraded, repeatedly raped, and purposely impregnated by these monsters. Why did the Senator go full outrage on the fictional rape, but ignore the real thing? Maybe she didn’t see the New York Times article. After all, she’s a busy US Senator. Why would she see a news article from the nation’s largest newspaper about a major international crisis? Right?
In 2006 James Bond was issued a personalized weapon in the movie “Casino Royale.” This was one cool gadget. Q explained to him that the grip of the pistol had been programmed with Bond’s palm print. It would not fire unless it was his hand pulling the trigger. Incredibly, the technology paid off! Imagine the viewer’s surprise when during a fight scene James found himself staring the wrong way down his own gun’s sights! Thank goodness Q had foreseen this! That “smart gun” saved his life!
Soon after the release of “Casino Royale” the extremely Liberal state of New Jersey passed a law that essentially said that once “smart gun” technology was available for sale in the United States a timer would start ticking. That timer was set for 2 years. Once the timer went off, “smart guns” would be the only guns available for sale in the state of New Jersey. Now, where do you suppose they got that idea? Someone watches a movie where a fictional “smart gun” saves a fictional spy’s life and suddenly it becomes a real law! It’s interesting to note that when the police in New Jersey heard about this they immediately declared that they needed to be exempt from this law. In the movie, the gun worked perfectly! James Bond (who is licensed to kill people) was able to fire the gun, but the bad guy was not. In reality, there is one “smart gun” on the market. It’s a .22. It requires the shooter to wear a watch with a chip in it. It is 95% reliable. So the state of New Jersey wants the only gun available for sale to be the caliber least likely to stop a threat, dependent on the owner wearing a watch at the right time, and be only 95% reliable. No thanks.
Ted Danson plays the wise leader of a group of crime scene investigators on the hit TV show CSI. I don’t watch the show, but saw a re-run when flipping around the other day. Ted’s character was talking in very judgmental tones about the AR-15 rifle. He said that the AR-15 was capable of spraying 30 bullets per second. This has been the mantra of the Liberal gun haters since the tragedy at Sandy Hook. They started calling them “Assault Weapons” until they were told that Assault Weapons were fully automatic weapons legal only for military use. They then made a slight correction to their fictional name and called them “Assault Rifles.” They went to Congress and demanded that they be banned…again. They proclaimed that these horrible weapons could “spray bullets at a rate of 30 per second!” They want to ban a gun that technically doesn’t exist, a gun that a fictional character made a fictional statement about. In reality, the AR-15 (AR does not stand for Assault Rifle) is simply a semi-automatic rifle. One bullet for each time you pull the trigger. Try that yourself. Count how many times you can make the trigger-pulling motion in a second.
Almost every channel has a cop show each weeknight. There are good cops. There are bad cops. One thing these cops have in common is an uncanny accuracy with their handguns. Using a 5” barrel and metal sites, they can drop a “perp” at 50 yards with a single shot! In their more compassionate moments faced with a bad guy with a gun, they will simply shoot the gun out of their hands or shoot them in the leg so they drop the gun and lay on the ground crying over their GSW. Anti-gun Libs complain about real life cops shooting to kill. They wonder why they don’t “shoot to wound” like the cops on TV. They complain that real life cops are too quick to kill a guy who is trying to kill the cop. I talked to a friend of mine about this. He is an officer in Florida. He also trains officers and civilians in the defensive use of firearms. He told me about a stop he made. As he steps out of his cruiser, the guy bursts out of his car pointing a gun at him. He’s charging. My friend drew his service weapon and fired. Typically, a trained officer fires around 3 shots at a time because a real handgun has a low accuracy rate. Fire 3 times and reassess. He did that. Three shots, but the guy was still rushing him with a gun. Three more shots, but he’s still coming. The officer ended up emptying his magazine before the charging man fell to the ground. The reality is that an officer that shoots to wound has a very short life.
We live in a media-rich environment. Everywhere we look there are LCD screens. Every one of them can deliver fictional content for our entertainment. What we need to remember is that those same screens can also deliver truth, but we have to search for it. When we get the fiction confused for the truth we end up feeling like a goose.
Keystone Jack 