Show Gun Safety: A New Approach to Gun Violence
We’re revisiting an episode from September 2023 about safe storage, the portrayal of weapons in media, and reducing gun violence. We hope this episode is helpful to you as you prepare to spend time with friends and family over the holidays.
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TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.
Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.
[00:00:14] Music Interlude.
Sarah [00:00:29] Thank you for being here today. Our team is off for Thanksgiving, so we're going to reshare a conversation we had last August with actress Piper Parable and Kris Brown of the Brady Organization about The Show Gun Safety program and ways to have better conversations about guns with the people in your life. Look, we know that under a Trump administration, it's a lot less likely we'll see sweeping gun reform passed. But that doesn't take all options for meaningful change off the table. And we hope this conversation reminds you about what is within the power of us as individuals and how we can help reduce gun violence in our own circles.
Also, don't forget, it's officially gift giving season, and we have a very lovingly designed gift guide for Pantsuit Politics fans. So if that's for yourself, get yourself a gift. If you want to share that with the people in your life and say, look, I'm always talking about Sarah and Beth, here's what you could get me. It's merch, it's tote bags, there's cameo options. It's all kinds of really cool gifts for the Pantsuit Politics fan in your life. And this weekend only, we are running a Black Friday sale with 24% off all our merchandise. So make sure you check out our shownotes for a link and for more information.
Up next, Show Gun Safety.
Music Interlude.
Beth Kris and Piper, thank you so much for spending time with us at Pantsuit Politics. I was thrilled when I found an article about your advocacy work around guns and Hollywood because I feel like a very stereotypical suburban mom on my soapbox about how I don't like the way that guns are depicted in TV and movies. And I feel like the parents of my childhood ranting about video games. But it was validating to see that you see this too. And I was reminded of how in business we say all the time that culture eats policy for breakfast. Why would that not be true? Why would Hollywood not have a role? So tell me about the work that you're doing with Brady.
Piper Perabo Sure. Thanks, Beth. Hi everybody, I'm so glad to be back on Pantsuit Politics. I was so excited that Brady was going to do this campaign to bring together a bunch of showrunners, where like basically creators of the TV shows we watch to talk about how we can put ideas about gun safety into television. What I like about Brady is they're not trying to be prescriptive. They're not saying like no guns or control the creativity of the writers. But one thing that they talked about, which they went to Washington, D.C., to talk at the White House about these ideas is safe storage. And my husband had been working on a show like a month earlier where there was a corrections officer, his wife woke up in the middle of the night in a scene on television, and he wasn't in the bed. And that was very unusual. And she rolled over and opened his bedside table drawer where there was a lock box, which she opened with her fingerprint and checked to make sure his service revolver was there. It was. She closes the box. Now she's really doesn't know what's going on. And you see her creep out of the room, like, what's going on? And I thought, that's the perfect way to do it. Because we're not saying that there aren't guns in the house, but we're normalizing safe storage and we're interlacing it right into a hero character. We're showing how it works, actually builds tension in the story. And so when I found out Brady was supporting this kind of idea about how we can normalize safety, that seemed like a great fit to me.
Sarah I still remember-- I think this movie is probably 15 years old. It was this dumb comedy called, I think, Couples Therapy with Vince Vaughn. And he does that. He rolls over and he touches his entire handprint on a gun safe before he opens it. And I don't remember anything else that happened in that movie, but it caught my attention so strongly. I still remember it straight up like 10 years later, because it was so impactful to see. It didn't have anything to do with the plot. I just thought, 'Oh, that was so smart' and it had such impact on me.
Beth Kris It seems like that is so consistent with Brady's goal of minimizing family fire. Could you talk a little bit about the connection between this project and Brady's larger campaign?
Kris Brown Absolutely. Thank you so much for inviting me on. I'm a big fan of your podcast and also of Piper, so it was a great thrill to get to work with her, others in the Hollywood community. And as she said, showrunners, those people who are really at the very genesis often of the shows that we love and are the folks who give birth to how most scenes are cut and the use of firearms. And so, the really exciting thing for Brady is that this is an offshoot of our End Family Fire campaign. That's something that we started in 2018, taking a look at other successful public health social norm change campaigns of which the United States has been a leader really in the world through an organization called the Ad Council that has brought us every successful social norm change campaign that's just embedded in the reality of how we live in America. From Smokey the Bear, the Designated Driver, to Buckle Up many, many of these campaigns that are aimed at saving lives. And this is no different. We now have a public health epidemic of gun violence. It's the number one killer of our kids.
And so, Brady really wanted to look back and see how we can change behavior around something super simple, which is if you're choosing to bring a firearm into your home, the number one way to end family fire-- and we define that is as the unintentional or intentional injury of a loved one with an unsecured gun in the home happens every day. Eight kids a day are killed or injured with guns in their own home. Seventy five percent of school shooters get their gun from a home where it is not safely stored. And suicide very tragically often happens. You have a 500 percent increased likelihood of experiencing a suicide in your home if you have a loaded and unsecured firearm. So we launched this ad campaign with the Ad Council defining this term Family Fire, and it now has over 2 billion views. If you're exposed to our ad campaign, you have a 50 percent increased likelihood of going to search for and acquire a gun safe in which to store all of your firearms.
To us, this is an absolutely critical campaign. And the work that we're now doing with Hollywood, with folks like Piper, is really an offshoot of that for us. Because as a culture, as you were saying, it's hard when we're watching movies for me anymore and TV, because of the pervasiveness of firearms in these shows is almost too often without any forethought. It's just a way to raise the stakes, but not necessarily to drive the storyline in any meaningful way. If we want to change our culture, then we know Hollywood has a big part of that, but we're not being prescriptive. And that's not the point of Brady. It's really to ask a series of questions about how guns are portrayed and justify doing that. We honestly think we can drive behavior change in the country. I know because we've done it in the past on other issues, that's how we've saved millions of lives. And firearms should not be excluded from that.
Sarah Well, that's what I always tell people when they talk about public health or how hard it is to change. I'm like, do y'all remember when everybody smoked? Babies, puppies, everybody smoked, literally everyone smoked until we decided, okay, we're going to work on our culture. And, look, that's true of Hollywood too. You go back and you watch movies and you're like, "Dang, everybody's smoking except me." Everybody's smoking in this movie. And I think that this is just another example. And I think what I'm really impressed with, because I think this is harder with gun safety, it's hard to capture, portray, harm that didn't happen. Plots are driven by harm and conflict that do happen. And so, to portray in a way that is impactful that this prevents harm, you do need creative types. You do need showrunners to sort of capture that. And I think it doesn't have to be fiction. I think all the time about a story I heard on This American Life where a girl picked up a loaded gun in her house to practice a scene in a play.
Like had been trained on gun safety her whole life and just thought, 'I'm going to just make sure and fire into the carpet.' It had a live round in it. Just in that split second she decided... I think about that story all the time, because that's a story that captures how hard it is to show what can happen and what didn't happen. But I think that creative mindset and that idea of let's just start normalizing it and trying to convey we can prevent harm, especially inside a debate that's been happening for so long, to bring some freshness to this cultural conversation about violence in movies. I remember in a class once where they show you James Cagney with his teeny tiny little handgun held like this all the way to Arnold Schwarzenegger with, like, beefed out. And that was the eighties. That was 40 years ago. So it's just this accelerated environment. Pushing back on that in any way I think is really, really important.
Kris Brown Absolutely.
Beth How is this being received? What obstacles are you encountering as you talk with people? Sarah was talking about the creative challenges. Are you hearing that from people as you do this work?
Kris Brown I've been surprised. But, of course, having folks like Piper and others involved is really important. It can't be an outsider's perspective, it actually has to come from the inside. That's very, very important. And we talked to a number of people who were executives and producers on the business side. And part of the reason that we have approached it the way we have, which is if you're in the business of making a TV show or a movie, ask yourself these three basic questions. Do I have to have a firearm at all? Just as a basic question. And what we've been so surprised is, well, you'd be shocked a lot of people aren't even asking that. So that's a Pretty fundamental question to ask. The second is, if you must, for whatever reason, then show safe storage. In the same way that Piper just said it, which it kind of gives me chills because we know that you look at the Supreme Court these days, it's not a surprise to me that their approval rating is in the garbage can, something like 14 percent. Congress is just ahead of that. But the characters that most average Americans have come into their living rooms in the evening are among the most trusted people in their life. Full stop, 100 percent.
If we have these characters that we care about exhibiting these kinds of behaviors, it's a really easy to model for all kinds of different people and different shows that appeal to different demographics, the very behavior we're talking about. And by the way, with the End Family Fire work that we've done, what we find is the people who care most about this and who often are already engaging in safe storage practices are legacy gun owners. Because if you grew up around guns, you know that while they can be a helpful tool in various circumstances, they also carry incredible risk. So most people who've grown up with guns, actually learn that their grandparents need exactly what they're supposed to be doing with those firearms. And I think because this is led from an organization like Brady, which includes gun owners and non-gun owners. Jim and Sarah owned guns. Even after Jim was shot, it gives it a much better opportunity and I think better reception than if we were simply saying ban firearms entirely from TV or movies or else we won't talk to you, which is decidedly not the approach we're taking here. So I've been very pleasantly surprised in the reception so far.
Sarah Well, and I would think among those gun owners, there's an opportunity because of the proliferation of like permitless carry. If you grew up where you needed permits and safety licenses and classes, and now all of a sudden it's a free for all and you really understand the risk as a gun owner, yeah, I can see how there would be an opportunity to start a fresh conversation. Piper, I'm under that rubric of a fresh conversation. Are you sensing any movement or momentum in Hollywood just because of the tragic death surrounding guns on sets that have happened? Is there a fresh perspective or an understanding of like, wow, we really do need to think. Like not just take that default should there be a gun here and start to make that a process that we're thinking through?
Piper Perabo The accidents that have happened recently on set, especially the shooting in the Rust film, that is so rare because the firearm safety on a television or film set is extreme. I wasn't present on the Rust set and so I don't know all the particulars of how that system went so wrong, but there are so many checks that have to happen before there is a weapon on set. And so the safety on set is not really what's I think gotten my community talking, but it's really the same thing that I'm talking about with my friends and neighbors, is what's happening in the real world. These shootings. I was talking to my mother in law last night on the phone and she said, "We've got to do something about these guns." And I said, "I know Jacksonville." I'd been in class all day. And she said, "No, there's been a shooting since Jacksonville." And I just thought like, oh my God. And so, I think when it comes to television and movies, we as a community are more like our neighbors who do every other kind of job, and that we're trying to figure out how we can be part of a solution. In fact, when I came back from seeing you, Kris, in Washington, my sister-in-law said, "Hey, so if my kids are going on a play date, how do I ask if they're firearms in the house stored safely?" And I was like, oh, let me go ask.
Sarah Just like that. Are there firearms in the house stored safely?
Piper Perabo I was like, let's put it on TV show. I would love to see that get asked on a TV show. Because my sister-in-law can ask me and I go ask [inaudible]. But that's only three people that if we can get that scene on a TV show. By the way, there's a lot of drama in that, doesn't have to be. But it's like just to see that modeled behavior. I think not everybody has access to the language to just keep it like-- if you got a kid who's allergic to peanuts, you tell them that. But when you drop your kid off for playdate and like, make sure they don't go in the pool. There's a lot of things when you drop your kid. So just also there's so many questions that we have as just a community of Americans. And I feel like we can put that stuff on TV too, so that we all have access just to non inflammatory language per se. Because we all agree on if the kids kept safe, everyone kept safe.
Sarah Yeah. Well, and I think that's interesting too. I would think that Gulf is an interesting entry point to this conversation between the safety on set and the safety portrayed in the actual productions. You know what I mean? That's a good entry point to say, like, well, wow, don't we want to make clear, even for our own industry sake? Like, this is how safely we handle guns. This is how this is done, the multiple level checks. Because that's what I always tell people especially around kids. I'm like, I'm glad your kids listen to me. My kids don't listen to me when I tell them to turn the TV off or just to stay away from something dangerous. You know what I mean? Like, I can't trust them with YouTube, much less a loaded firearm not stored safely.
Kris Brown Yeah. And I think asking the question, like Piper said, that campaign has been around for 20 plus years. Brady worked really hard to get pediatricians to include that in every child visit. But what you guys are talking about here, I think is so important because it's normalizing the conversation. To Piper's point, why is it? I have two daughters. My younger daughter is now 19, but when she was little, she was born allergic to cows milk, to eggs, to tree nuts. And not just mildly, it was risk of death. Anaphylaxis. Just awful. So I got used to being very to me-- at first as someone who's actually personally a rather shy person-- being, "Well, tell me everything that you have in your house because my daughter might die at a playdate at your house." And people would say, "Oh, thank you so much for asking." The last thing that they want is Sophia Brown having a reaction. And what I found once I got trained myself as a mom on the ASK Campaign, (Asking Saves Kids) is I could ask the question about firearms in the same exact way that I was asking about allergies. And it was so interesting doing it because I have friends who told me I never was asked before and just because you did, now I have started asking. Again, it's just interesting that can be with your sister in law. She'll start something there and then it just becomes normalized. That's really the beauty of this.
Sarah Well, and you don't have to just normalize it by asking I normalize about telling people. I tell people we have a firearm, it's stored in a safe. I think that's helpful to just normalize all of the information we share along with our cell phones when a child comes over.
Piper Perabo Well, and I think that's one of the reasons I like Beth and Sarah so much on Pantsuit is because you guys are talking about, a lot of times when I listen to the podcast, sometimes it's hard to have a conversation, but it just takes practice. You don't have to figure it all out in one go the first time. The first time you say that to another parent. Okay, maybe it's a little hard, maybe a little nervous, maybe a little shy, but you just practice it and it gets easier. And I like that you guys always talk about that because I feel like that's how we can do this.
Beth That's what I think is so powerful about this campaign too, because Hollywood creates permission structures. If I see it on my television and I have some permission to engage in it, good and bad. It is a lot of power that you all wield. And I try to do that with the ask question. I start by volunteering. We don't have guns in our home, so my kids do not know how to handle this. And I just want to let you know that and make sure that everything's safely stored because my girls don't have exposure to this. So it's not accusatory at all.
Piper Perabo That's a nice way to do it.
Beth I'm not like giving the vibe of I think you're a bad person if you have a gun. It's just I want to let you know where we're coming from. And I think seeing that on TV would just really open up a lot of conversations. I love that idea.
Kris Brown Yeah, I'd love to see more of that.
Sarah What are your goals for this campaign? Do you have set timelines? Or so many movies you're trying to get safe storage inside of? Like, what are the goals?
Kris Brown I want this campaign-- and of course I lead a nonprofit, so I have to have very aggressive goals. So I would like five years from now to look at the content that we're seeing in TV shows. And by the way, I do think Piper can answer this much better than I can. I've gotten a real education, but TV shows are our first kind of entry point. I would like to see the movies too, but I would really like TV shows that are produced going forward if they're going to depict firearms, that they do it in a way that shows one of two things: safe storage and the benefits of safe storage in saving lives. Because that's real. Or the perils of failing to safely store firearms. And I don't think that it is too aggressive a goal to say five years from now that that is the norm that we are seeing on TV. It's absolutely achievable. And from the discussions that we've had with so many showrunners, the really interesting thing is that there's a way to do it that drives the narrative, that does not take away from excellent storytelling. It actually provides even more opportunities. And Piper, you talked about this, but I think it's so interesting to hear your perspective. For actors, it makes it much more interesting, right? Instead of the gun just being a prop.
Sarah It's our reality. Good storytelling is based in reality, and that's our reality as Americans. There's a lot of guns out there.
Piper Perabo And I think Brady's so smart about encouraging that it's coming from a creative place. Brady's not saying how to do it. They're just saying we want to see it and we want to see the consequences of it. And if you let the writers-- but also when we were talking about it as the industry group that got together, we're like and the props department and the actors and everybody who's going to be a part of it, be a part of that conversation so that there are many creative storytelling ways to talk about this. Because it's not about just saying no guns. I mean, that just flattens everything out. What it's about is talking about it more, showing it more responsible gun ownership or the consequences of not. Because there are so many things that can happen there. And that's where you can really utilize the creative community. And they'll come up with amazing stories that I would have never even considered.
Kris Brown Yeah. And, look, ultimately what we're talking about is human lives here and the difference that can be made. And so I think about my friend Kristin Song, who her son Ethan had just gotten his braces off. He's 15 years old and he went on a play date at his best friend's house. It's similar to the story that you told before, but it ended tragically. The boy who is his best friend had a firearm that was actually his dad's service weapon. He thought that it was unloaded, that there were no bullets. There were. And Ethan was unintentionally shot and died an hour later in the hospital. And Kristin talks about this so emphatically. She's just an incredible warrior. She's passed a number of state laws, is looking to do so at the federal level around safe storage. But if it had been more normalized, she would have asked the question every single time because even Ethan knew something about firearms. But these are children. These are kids. Kristin didn't have any in her home, but we know as parents by the time your kids hit eight or nine years old you are not in control of what happens in other people's houses at all. And so I think as we're saying, the opportunity to normalize this by seeing this replicated in real stories that are delivered to Americans, it will make it so much easier for people to have these conversations. And really the real thing that I think we will see is an appreciable decline in these kinds of gun violence, injuries and deaths.
And if you look at those numbers, quite frankly, more than legislation, more than better enforcement of the law. I want both of those things too, and we'll continue to work on that. This has the opportunity, if we do it well, to save more lives than all of those things combined. That's why I'm so excited about this. And Brady is putting so much behind it because that's how a Designated Driver saved millions of lives. That's how Buckle Up did. It was integrated into the Brady Bunch where Jan and Greg-- I remember this because I saw The Brady Bunch. I was one of those impressionable kids and they're like, "Mom and dad, why are we buckling up when you're not?" Because [inaudible] had done this big study and seen that the kids were learning at school how to do it. But the parents who grew up without seat belts are like, "Well, my kids can do it, but I'm not doing it." So adults were still dying in high numbers from traffic fatalities. So they got the kids to hector the adults. I saw that episode of Brady Bunch went right up to my dad and was like, you're going to start buckling up. You have to do this and that. And he was like, "If I do, will you stop being such a pain?" I'm like, "Yeah, I won't ask you again." Just think about that. But that was a whole campaign. That is Hollywood stepping up. And so they had a history of doing that, except here, and that's what we really want to change.
Beth I love that. And I love the layering that came out from the drunk driving campaign or the seat belt campaign, because I could see if I am as a writer or a showrunner thinking about safe storage and the depictions of gun safety, then I'm probably going to incorporate that into the storytelling as well.
Kris Brown Yeah, exactly.
Beth My chief complaint as a mom is how many times I see a movie with my kids where killing people is used just as a device to physically move a character from point A to point B. We're just killing all these people to clear a path to get from place to place, and there's no fallout from it. And I think if you're going back to just the handling of the weapon by the character, then maybe we start thinking about all of those nameless people that we're seeing just dying onscreen without any consequence to.
Sarah Well, and I just think to like changing the ideas around like a gun that flows through your possession. I just think people treat it like an object and you have a gun in your car and you don't save store it and someone steals that and it's like they stop thinking about that object in your life. But because you didn't safe store that object and it got stolen, what did it go on to do? I think there's a real creative opportunity to say the life of the gun and your participation in it, what happened? Like, that's the gun in my life because I won it in a stupid giveaway and immediately at a police officers conference and they tried to buy it on me and I was like, no way. It's not passing through my possession and then going out into the world where I won't know what it does. It can rot at the top of my closet. Like, no way.
Beth I would love an episode of a show or a movie where someone inherits guns and is thinking about what do we do now? Do we sell them? What's our participation in that chain of custody? I think there's so many good stories to be told here.
Kris Brown So many.
Beth I'm really excited about your work.
Music Interlude.
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