Some time ago I wrote a post about a movie called Miss Sloane.  What brings it to mind is that I saw the first trailer on TV a couple of days ago.

This is it:

Compare that to the first trailer I saw some months ago:

Notice a difference?

They took the entire “going after the gun industry plot” out of the trailer.

MY HOW THE WINDS OF CHANGE BLOW!!!

The first trailer was launched in September.  The second trailer was launched the day after Trump won the election.  Maybe this is a coincidence, but a part of me doesn’t think so.  Especially since I have only seen the second trailer on TV.

The full trailer gives a lot of the plot of the movie.  Professionally successful lobbyist with no work/life balance tries to destroy the gun lobby/gun industry because she suddenly comes down with a case of conscience.

A review by the NY Times  describes the character of Miss Sloane as “chilly.”  That is an understatement.

With her heavily applied crimson lipstick, copper hair and pallid complexion, Elizabeth is beautiful but scary. She’s just one step away from a bloodless cousin of Morticia Addams.

She’s scary.

Elizabeth is shown testifying before a Senate subcommittee. Questioned about breaking ethical rules by arranging a trip for a senator to Indonesia to research the feasibility of a tariff on palm oil, she repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment.

She’s corrupt and is engaged in the personal enrichment of politicians for political favors.

We learn early in the film that Elizabeth lives on little sleep and relies on a roller coaster regimen of uppers and downers. Outside of work, she has no personal life. Her needs for intimacy are met by studly male escorts, one of whom, Forde (Jake Lacy), becomes a regular.

She abuses prescription drugs, is totally loveless, and her personal relationships are non existent.

When under siege, she doesn’t disguise her arrogance and contempt, and she bullies underlings.

She’s a bully.

Elizabeth demurs. Having changed her views on gun ownership “somewhere between Columbine and Charleston,” she now supports background checks for gun buyers.

A cold, corrupt, loveless woman, with terrible personal relationship abilities, who abuses underlings when she gets mad, and decides to push for  universal background checks after a politically convenient mass shooting.  She’s Hillary Clinton, but Hollywood pretty.  She’s a cross between Hillary Clinton and Patrick Bateman.

No wonder a different NY Times review says “Jessica Chastain’s ‘Miss Sloane’ Echoes Campaign Rhetoric.”

The filmmakers acknowledge that their project plays very differently than it would have had Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Trump. But they say they can’t control how “Miss Sloane” will be perceived by filmgoers and critics in light of the election outcome.

No shit.  Miss Sloane was supposed to be a Hollywood victory lap.  Then Trump won.  There was no Clinton victory to take a lap for.  Now this studio is stuck with this movie on their hands and they know the truth about it.  A movie about a cold, manipulative, humorless woman taking down the gun industry?  That’s just a Hillary Clinton presidency fan fiction biopic.  In the 2,623 counties of Trump voting Middle America, that will rank in theater popularity somewhere between Justin Trudeau’s History of the Thrid Reich and The Love and Romance of Anthony Weiner.

Now the new trailer makes sense.  They have to downplay the push for gun control because Trump voting Middle America won’t see it.  They have to try and sell it as a political thriller and not a celebrity reenactment of a Hillary rally.

A two-hour-plus drama about a divisive issue represents a gamble in the superhero-driven marketplace, and the odds against “Miss Sloane” may have increased since Mr. Trump’s victory.

That’s what I just said.  They have to lie about the plot to trick Trump voters to go an see it to fluff the opening weekend box office.

This movie is a Hoover filled with TNT, it’s going to suck and bomb at the same time.

Despite this, or maybe because of it, it will probably win an Oscar.  If there is one thing Hollywood is good at it is blowing itself and celebrating just how wonderful it is no matter how the public votes with their dollars.

Partly because “Miss Sloane” is more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.

Fumbling the issues and suffering from a preposterous ending?  Sounds like Hillary Clinton to me.

And a Feel-Good moment video (Hat tip to Rusell S.:

With cherry on top:

Introduced by Senator Steube and it reads:

It appears to be a clarification of 790.162 or even an expansion. My question would be how will be interpreted regarding 776.08 and 776.12:

My very non-legal opinion is that seeks to clarify or at least help a defendant who is verbally being threatened with deadly force and produces his own firearm before the attacker gets to his. (All other requirements of self-defense still must be present.)

Still, in the words of Jon Gutmacher, I don’t want to be Defendant Zero and test this bill if it becomes law.

OK, everybody start humming/meditating/invoking and let’s see if we can get Andrew Branca to offer his opinion. 😀

This is a quick follow-up on J. Kb.’s Not So Good at Math. For those new reading the blog or may have missed it, I covered before the deceptive writings of VPC’s Concealed Carry Killers before. I had not checked on it on a while and decided to see what’s new.

I found a newly designed site and what appears to be a mixture of clickbait with a disclaimer, just like those parody news websites like The Onion of Duffleblog.

And that is how they do it: They beef up the numbers by adding suicides and accidents. And if that is not all, a lot of the remaining cases are tagged “Pending” because the courts have not decided on the particulars and in some incidents charges have not been brought, but they add them just the same.

You click on Florida, and you will see cases like Anthony Martin who shot and killed a person who was fighting a friend and drew his own weapon. Police did not arrest Mr. Martin and even stated that the case might be self-defense. Next we have suicides cases like Jamie Brunette or accidental like Latrecia Levine. But examples like this, take the cake, the biscuits and  the pancakes:

Death by strangulation. If you think about it, it is a fact-based story: it was a homicide & the defendant had a concealed weapons permit. The old readers of this blog already know I am going to quote a small dialog from a movie. In fact, I have quoted it so many times and I know I will continue to do so I made a meme:

It seems the Violence Policy center has no problem lying to the readers of this “report” because they will challenge you about having their facts correct. If you read again the first graphic, they are not telling you that Concealed Carriers are shooting people, just that they have a permit to carry. Not true, but accurate.

A fact-based lie.

PS: I forgot about mocking them (just a bit) in the past.

The editorial board at the New York Times is concerned about “The Threat to Public Safety if ‘Concealed Carry’ Goes National.”

Their problem, of course, is that we CCW permit holders are just too dangerous.

There were eight million Americans with concealed-carry permits in 2012, according to federal data. That number has been growing rapidly with the gun lobby’s success in loosening state restrictions, making it possible for permit holders to pack guns in university classes and many public venues.

By 2015, the number has jumped to over 12.8 million active CCW permits.

But since 2007, concealed-carry permit holders have been responsible for at least 898 deaths not involving self-defense, according to the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety group.

Actually… the VPC is an anti-gun organization.  They operate an anti-CCW website called  Concealed Carry Killers, so they might just be a little bit biased.  BUT, for the sake of argument, lets accept their data as 100% accurate.

VPC data lists 898 deaths in 9 years.  The Crime Prevention Research Center shows that in 2007 there were 4.6 million people with CCW permits and by July, 2016 there are 14.5 million people with CCW permits.

Let’s say that the increase in permits has been linear, so the average number of permits from 2007 to 2016 is 9.55 million.  That gives us for 2007 – 2016, 1 non-justified shooting for every 10,635 CCW permit holders, or 0.0094% of CCW permit holders committed a non-justified shooting.

The CDC data on homicides is inconsistent by year.  Everytown lists an average of 11,184 homicides per year 2010 – 2014.  We know from the CDC in 2007 the number was higher than that, at 18,361 and in 2008 that went down to 16,799. We can only get national data as early as 2014, but lets assume that the Everytown average works for 2007 – 2016 (it will actually be higher, but I’m putting the numbers in VPC’s favor) than we get in 9 year a total of roughly 100,656 total homicides.

Combining that with the CCW data, that tells us that 2007 – 2016, only 0.89% of homicides were committed by CCW holders.

Lets compare with logic, shall we.

To date, there have been 661 fatal shootings in Chicago, a city with a population of 2.7 million.  That means that for just 2016 alone there was one fatal shooting for ever 4,085 Chicagoans or 0.024% of Chicagoans shot and killed somebody.  Statistically, you are more than twice as likely to be shot and killed by a random resident of the City of Chicago than by a CCW permit holder.

For Baltimore, it is 1 murder for every 2,816 residents of the Charm City.

If the NY Times is trying to scare me with the horrors of national CCW leading to murderous rampages by CCW permit holders, the numbers just don’t do that.  Seems to me that it’s safer to be in the company of CCW permit holders than around a random sampling of residents of any of the big Blue cities in America.

Sebastian beat me to this article. But since he writes better, might as well go with his version

John Feinblatt is Bloomberg’s chosen leader for Everytown. He was a muckety muck in Bloomberg’s Administration as Mayor of New York City, and has been involved in Bloomberg’s gun control efforts since the beginning. He pens an article in the Daily News, which I will address point by point. The gist of the article is that NRA doesn’t really mean it when they say “enforce the laws we already have,” and so Feinblatt offers his own ideas on what that means:

Source: Head of Everytown: Throw the Book at Them | Shall Not Be Questioned

ALBANY — Background checks have stopped more than three million gun sales since the signature Brady bill was signed 23 years ago, a leading gun control group announced Wednesday.The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence announced the finding to both mark the anniversary of the bill’s signing and to warn that a growing number of gun purchases are falling through the law’s cracks.

Source: Brady background checks stopped more than 3 million gun sales – NY Daily News

Where are the 3 million prosecutions for violation of the Brady Background Checks Law? How many prosecutions ended up in convictions? How many served or are serving time?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?