OPINION:
Movie producer Harvey Weinstein announced for the first time on Howard Stern’s radio show that he is making a full feature drama to try to destroy the National Rifle Association.
Mr. Stern asked Mr. Weinstein on Wednesday whether he owned a gun. The Hollywood heavyweight replied that he did not and never would. “I don’t think we need guns in this country. And I hate it,” the producer said. “I think the NRA is a disaster area.”
Mr. Weinstein then revealed his secret project about the gun rights group. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’ll tell it to you, Howard,” he said. “I’m going to make a movie with Meryl Streep, and we’re going to take this head-on. And they’re going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them.”
The shock jock asked whether the film was going to be a documentary. Mr. Weinstein said no, that it would be a “big movie like a ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’” The title of the film will be “The Senator’s Wife.”
The movie mogul said his vision was to scare people away from firearms. He foresees moviegoers to leave thinking, “Gun stocks — I don’t want to be involved in that stuff. It’s going to be like crash and burn.”
The chairman of the Weinstein Co. (formerly Miramax) is one of President Obama’s biggest fundraisers. He brought in more than $500,000 from his Hollywood friends for the president’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2012.
The 5 million members of the NRA are law-abiding Americans who are active in preserving the right to protect themselves and their families.
Mr. Weinstein thinks guns are necessary for self-defense, but only in other countries, during genocides and if the weapon is not personally owned.
Mr. Stern pointed out the inconsistencies in Mr. Weinstein’s earlier comments about a project about Jews defending themselves during the Holocaust. The producer replied that the justification for using a gun is “when you’re marching a half of a million people into Auschwitz.”
Mr. Weinstein does not seem to know that the Nazis were able to confiscate the guns that the Jewish people owned based on Germany’s government registry.
Also, the producer said he would have used a gun to stop from going to a concentration camp if he “found a gun, and if that was happening to my people.”
Mr. Weinstein has been watching too many movies if he thinks the good guys find fully loaded firearms in convenient locations to use only when necessary.
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Before Mr. Weinstein and Miss Streep start production of their multimillion-dollar effort to persuade Americans to give up their guns, they might want to look at the history books of what happens when you do.
Emily Miller is senior editor of opinion for The Washington Times and author of “Emily Gets Her Gun” (Regnery, 2013).
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