Editorial: After the latest mass shooting, we’re focusing on the wrong amendment

HILLSBORO, Ohio — Growing up on a small southern Ohio farm, the favorite Christmas gift I received as a child was a “Rifleman” rifle, ordered from the Sears “wish book” that still arrived in mailboxes in the 1960s.

“The Rifleman” was a TV Western starring Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain. His rifle was modified with a looped, hinged lever that allowed him to fire in rapid succession. My toy version looked and functioned like that TV rifle, but fired caps instead of bullets.

Still, in my imaginary world — where our barn and corn cribs served as forts, shacks and Old West hideouts — I dispatched many a bank robber, horse thief and outlaw with my “Rifleman” rifle. In the decades that followed, I’ve never considered shooting anyone in real life.

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Hollywood violence has come a long way since the bloodless shootings on classic TV Westerns...

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In January 2017, The Post reported on a study in the journal Pediatrics that found that gun violence had soared in movies rated PG-13. “In fact . . . the amount of gun violence in the 30 top-grossing PG-13 movies now exceeds the gun violence in the top R-rated flicks. And it is continuing to rise,” the article noted, adding that “there is evidence that such scenes may contribute more generally to aggressive behavior and desensitization to violence.”

And yet, after horrific events such as the recent mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Fla., Hollywood’s finest are predictably among the first to point fingers at the National Rifle Association or Republicans in Congress for opposing gun control. They apparently view the ability to purchase guns as a worse culprit than the portrayals of repetitive acts of gun violence that increasingly dominate our entertainment platforms.

Gun-control advocates argue that when crafting the Second Amendment, our founders could not have foreseen AK-47s or AR-15s. True. But it is just as reasonable to suggest that those same founders, in crafting the First Amendment, could not have anticipated Hollywood and its propensity to produce movies where depictions of gun violence dominate as much as 40 percent of a film, as was the case with “G.I. Joe: Retaliation,” according to the Pediatrics study.

Click here to read the entire op-ed in the Washington Post.