On The Beat

Hollywood sits in the firing line as the gun control battle heats up, says Washington bureau chief Brooks Boliek.



"Who Wants to be a Millionaire" may be the top show, but for my money the most compelling TV last week was on C-SPAN 2, where gun control advocates actually won a vote in the Senate. Guns and Hollywood are the twin poles of the debate over the nation's violent nature.

Conservatives point at Hollywood. Liberals point at guns. Hollywood screams the First Amendment. The NRA screams the Second. On Wednesday, Republican leader Trent Lott and Democratic leader Tom Daschle screamed at each other. It was the most absorbing pilot since Regis took the game-show stage.

As entertaining as the show was, it was just a preview. The "Million Mom March" and the vicious fight over a symbolic vote portend the future episodes as gun control becomes a campaign focal point.

Vice President Al Gore and the Democrats obviously think they have a winner. Seven Republicans, five of whom are up for re-election this fall, joined all Democrats except one in supporting the gun control resolution.

Hell, just for laughs, I won four votes for a gun control bill in Felix's Oyster Bar in New Orleans during the NCTA convention. One of the weird things about writing for The Hollywood Reporter is the line of questions I get when people find out what I do. It makes little difference if I'm in the French Quarter or inside the Beltway.

It's kind of hard to explain copyright law in a bar, so I told the fellow in the grimy ballcap from Philadelphia sitting next to me and my dot-com buddy that I wrote about gun control. I bought him a beer and told him that people who don't want gun control blame Hollywood for the nation's violence. He said he is a hunter and a gun owner, but after finding out that firearms kill more young men than anything else, even he admitted something has to be done.

The First Amendment has limits. You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater unless there's a fire. There's libel and slander. A right to privacy has developed as a check against the press. The Second Amendment also needs to change with the times.

The hunter from Philly, the barman, the oyster shucker, my dot-com buddy and the 750,000 people on the Mall all agree its time to do something. Three-quarters of a million people, may not be an audience as big as the one Regis gets on "Millionaire," but it's one that's getting too big to ignore.