Hollywood and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence are teaming up via CBS’s S.W.A.T. to include gun control messages during the show.
For example, CNN reported that in one episode, actor Shemar Moore’s character Daniel “Hondo” Harrelson comes home from a shift as a cop and makes sure to take his service firearm to the closet and lock it up before sitting down to talk with his wife.
Moore commented on the scene, saying, “I’m big badass Hondo, and I get out there and take down bad guys, but when I come home…I own a firearm, but it’s safe, it’s protected.”
The scene is a result of a collaboration between Hollywood and Brady’s “Show Gun Safety” campaign.
The “Show Gun Safety” website says:
Guns are prominently featured in television, art, music, and movies across the globe, but only America has a gun violence epidemic. In America, we have more guns than people. Every year, over 40,000 people are shot and killed. Our nation’s gun violence crisis impacts nearly every fabric of American life. It will take a comprehensive approach to end this epidemic, and changing the culture and behaviors around firearms must be part of the solution. The creative community can play a powerful role in leading those solutions.
The website also contains “principles” which they want Hollywood to follow:
1. Use our creativity to model responsible gun ownership and show consequences for reckless gun use. We will make a conscious effort to show characters locking their guns safely and making them inaccessible to children.
2. Have at least one conversation during pre-production regarding the way guns will be portrayed on screen and consider alternatives that could be employed without sacrificing narrative integrity.
3. Limit scenes including children and guns, bearing in mind that guns are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents.
Ironically, Brady posits “over 40,000” as an approximate figure of gun deaths annual gun deaths but does not mention that over 60 percent of those deaths are the result of suicides rather than gun violence.
UC Davis pointed out this often overlooked fact regarding 2019 death figures: “There were 39,707 deaths from firearms in the U.S. in 2019. Sixty percent of deaths from firearms in the U.S. are suicides. In 2019, 23,941 people in the U.S. died by firearm suicide.” This means the number of gun violence deaths–i.e., homicides–in 2019 was approximately 15,766, a much lower figure than “over 40,000” and not as easy to use for gun control fund raising.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at
