Hollywood is certainly a town of philosophical convenience and hypocrisy. I mean, how many famous actors have become PETA activists while not knowing that film stock contains animal products?
Still, to my knowledge, the gun issue has to be Hollywood's greatest hypocrisy.
The guys like Charlton Heston, Adam Baldwin (no relation to Alec), and John Schneider who were/are highly experienced with guns and supporters of the Second Amendment are pretty rare. Guys like Alec Baldwin, people who would like to get guns banned while constantly using guns on set, are far more common.
This is a real problem and I'm actually amazed that it hasn't been a bigger problem on movie sets. The two most dangerous types of people to have a gun are people who are emotionally or mentally disturbed and people who don't know what the hell they're doing.
Anti-gun activists are pretty consistently the kind of people who take pride in not being particularly knowledgeable about guns. That's where you get people like Jon-Erik Hexum who think that blanks aren't dangerous and end up causing harm.
This is actually a weird thing. It's the anti-gun people who harp about how dangerous and scary guns are; but, due to the sheer lack of experience that anti-gun activists have with guns, they do tend to lack the true sense of gravity of what it means when you pull that trigger.
One of the things that we used to do in my gunshow group when I was a teenager is fire a blank at an aluminum can from several feet away and show people that it gets obliterated to demonstrate why we practice gun safety protocols even with blanks. The gun isn't safe. Still, the moment that you fire a real .45 calibur round and see what that can do, that's when you really respect the damn gun. That's when you really get it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Alec Baldwin had never shot a live round in his life before he killed somebody.
