The entertainment industry has long had a double standard on guns. They lecture us about our gun rights, how we should give up our firearms because they supposedly make us less safe, even as they’re surrounded by armed security. They repeat the lecture from the set of their new action thriller, where they’re shooting guns all the time.
And that’s when they’re not being absolutely ridiculous about what a gun can and can’t do. Does anyone else remember the undetectable Glocks in Die Hard 2?
But the hypocrisy is reaching a new low.
Let’s start with how Amazon is apparently removing the gun from 007’s hand.
In more than 60 years of adventures, James Bond has faced off against villains ranging from Blofeld to Le Chiffre. But none of them has managed to do what Jeff Bezos and his henchmen did to the international superspy: take his weapons away.
Last week, eagle-eyed movie fans noticed that the promotional images used on Amazon Prime Video for the various James Bond movies had been edited to remove any trace of the character holding a gun. For example, in a promotional shot for Dr. No, showing Sean Connery as Bond, the spy’s famous Walther PPK was missing. Images of other James Bonds, including Daniel Craig (in Spectre), Roger Moore (in Live and Let Die), and Pierce Brosnan (in GoldenEye), had also had their weapons edited out.
The changes came just in time for James Bond Day, October 5, which marked the 63rd anniversary of the first Bond film, Dr. No. Amazon had just recently added the catalog of films to its streaming service.
Judging from the reactions on X, fans were not pleased with the new, peace-loving Bond. “The snowflakes don’t belong anywhere near 007,” opined one user. “Next … they will probably eliminate any scenes from the movies with guns,” wrote another. Someone going by the handle Agent Smart posited that the editing is “the most American approach to gun control imaginable.”
James Bond’s Walther PPK is probably the most iconic firearm in film history. It’s also been great advertising for Walther, because just about everyone I know who has one has it because of James Bond. Hell, it’s why I want a PPK. It’s not because I’m a fan of .380 or that I think it’ll be fun to shoot. It’s because James Bond had one, and that’s enough reason for me.]
And gunplay is part of what happens in James Bond movies. He gets into gunfights on the regular. He shoots bad guys and seduces the ladies. Everyone knows this is part of what he does.
So why Photoshop it out?
Because guns cannot be allowed to be seen by just anyone. Guns are evil, you see, and they might influence someone if they just see it while scrolling through their Prime Video feed, and thus they can’t take that chance.
The actual violence is just fine, of course. Amazon has no problem with gun violence in its movies and series. I mean, just watch Reacher or Jack Ryan, for example.
It’s just the advertising.
But it’s also not just Amazon pimping shows with gunfights that is adverse to guns in advertising. It seems more traditional TV networks are reticent to show a gun, even when someone is paying them to advertise some kind of gun.
We’ve talked here about Byrna before. It’s a less-lethal gun that I’m less than impressed by, personally, but for some people, it’s probably the best option. They don’t want a gun, and a Byrna is better than using harsh language.
Recently, they’ve started advertising on some cable channels. My wife likes some of these channels that will run NCIS or Criminal Minds all day. There are plenty of guns on the programs.
Yet this is Byrna’s ad.
They’re using a banana as a proxy for their gun because, well, we can only surmise that it’s because a Byrna is a gun-shaped object, and therefore hard to get channels to run the ads. They need to send people to their website so they can show them the actual product, but they’ve set the stage for it pretty well.
It’s wild that this is on television at all, even if it’s way up in the channel numbers where ad time is cheaper.
But it’s also wild that they can’t advertise a less lethal gun, even in between episodes of Gibbs shooting terrorists on NCIS.
I honestly can’t comprehend why guns are unacceptable in advertisements, be they for a movie or for a non-firearm product, but are perfectly acceptable on the programs themselves, where people get all kinds of terrible ideas of how to use a gun.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
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