Currently images promoting guns are banned by the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency. Recently, posters for the film "The Other Guys", starring Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, had been altered to comply with San Francisco's gun imagery ban. Across the country, billboards for this film show the actors with guns in each hand. However, on posters in San Francisco, the two actors are shown not holding guns, but instead pepper spray cans. After learning of this, Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, had sixteen posters promoting the group's gun rights policy conference put up in San Francisco. The poster features a woman armed with a shotgun, and the red bold print reads, "A violent criminal is breaking through your front door. Can you afford to be unarmed?” The posters were installed last week in many bus stops. “We were prepared to go to court and sue if they did not put them up,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “Having a gun is a constitutional right.” Paul Rose, a spokesman for the city’s transportation agency, said that after the gun group’s posters went up, the city decided to take another look at its policy. The agency is now reviewing their policy in light of the recent June 28 Supreme Court decision in McDonald v. Chicago, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the right to bear arms guaranteed under the Second Amendment applied to state and local gun control laws.
In conclusion, the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency's policy of banning gun posters will probably be reconsidered and changed. A gun rights group in the area showed its outrage when they learned that a movie poster with guns had been altered in San Francisco. Additionally, the recent Supreme Court decision does say that the Second Amendment applies to local gun control laws, so something will have to be done about that.
It's very strange to me that their simply can't be pro-gun images on posters. It astonishes me the level of censorship that is going on just up in San Fransisco, hopefully this will change soon.
ReplyDeleteWhile I understand that San Francisco is attempting to promote peace and possibly decrease its crime rate by not "encouraging" people to use guns, a movie poster isn't exactly advertising actual crime. It's absolutely censorship to substitute the guns with "pepper spray".
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