Carl McCrow and Martin Scorsese Partner to Profit Gun Manufacturers

A British artist, Carl McCrow, has figured out a way to increase gun manufacturers bottom line, and his own.  I can almost hear the manufacturers thinking “please throw me into that briar patch”.  From nbcnews.com:

LONDON — British artist Carl McCrow is asking the world’s most successful filmmakers to make an unambiguous pledge: For every gun that appears in their movies, he wants them to destroy a real one.

The irony is doubly delicious because McCrow has made his living with firearms art, and this is his way to feel less “guilty”.  He lives in New York City.  

Asking directors to destroy one gun for every firearm that appears in their films is McCrow’s way of attempting to offset his enjoyment of violence in entertainment — a “guilty pleasure” he shares with much of the population.

He said the idea takes inspiration from carbon offsetting schemes, in which people plant trees or invest in other environment projects to counteract their own carbon footprint.

The error, of course, is in the premise, which is that more firearms are bad, and less firearms are good.  It has empirically been shown to be false.   The worst case is when only a small minority have guns, and lord it over the rest of the population, like in Somalia, the Sudan, or Brazil now, or Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime, or North Korea today.

Consider McCrow’s proposition as a process:

Step 1. Buy guns. Profit goes to gun makers.

Step 2. Destroy guns.

Step 3. Buy more guns for next movie. More profit goes to gun makers.

Repeat as often as desired.

The gun manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank. and logical thinkers look at this and think “They cannot really be this stupid, can they?”

Is McCrow really this stupid?  I do not think so.  He just scored a fantastic merchandising coup for his art.  Ka-Ching!

©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.

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