OPINION:
Rejina Sincic is a video producer in San Francisco, where she makes short independent films and commercials, mostly to sell ladies’ nether garments. She owns the production company and recently helped found another, enabling her to “branch out” to release a “public service announcement” about her campaign against “gun violence.” She invited broadcast outlets to use the “public service announcement,” called a PSA in the trade, and join her campaign.
Few outlets are likely to broadcast this PSA because it reflects an “understanding” of guns and the law that would impress and persuade only the already persuaded within the warm and fuzzy limits of San Francisco. The advice she offers could get someone who takes it either (a) killed or (b) to land in the pokey, and likely for a long time. The PSA depicts a high school boy sneaking into his mother’s bedroom, stealing her handgun, slipping it into his backpack and heading off to school. The gun may be loaded and ready for action, or it may not. He doesn’t bother to check, risking an accidental discharge, but he gets to class and the viewer can wonder whether he’s about to take out his teacher and fellow students.
He doesn’t, and when the class ends he takes the handgun from his backpack, puts it on his teacher’s desk and beseeches her to “take it away, I don’t feel safe with a gun in my house.” The video fades with Regina Sincic’s parting message: “Our children deserve a safe world. Stop gun violence now.”
The young man broke several laws in stealing a gun from his mother, carrying it concealed on his person without a permit and taking it to school, and he could have got himself into serious trouble with the law if he had confronted an alert policeman along the way. He would have been arrested, expelled from school and branded as crazy or a criminal, or both. To celebrate such an act, however noble Ms. Sincic might think it to be, is to encourage lawlessness and irresponsibility. If Ms. Sincic’s video had been a shot at a target on an Army firing range, she would have missed the target altogether, where such a badly aimed shot gets a red flag called “Maggie’s drawers.”
The National Rifle Association teaches gun safety to youngsters in a responsible and effective way. Through its “Eddie Eagle” program, the NRA teaches kids to stay away from guns and tells them that if they come upon a gun, they shouldn’t pick it up, play with it or even touch it, but find and notify an adult at once. Unlike Ms. Sincic, the NRA has a grasp on firearms safety, an insight into the minds of children and knowledge of the law. If she had wanted to make a video to persuade, and not merely to make her like-minded fanatics feel good about themselves, she could have consulted someone who knows what he or she is talking about. She might have avoided Maggie’s drawers and hit a bull’s-eye.
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