Bill Maher slams Hollywood for romanticizing gun violence in films

Washington [US], June 11 : American comedian and host Bill Maher closed his show 'Real Time with Bill Maher' on Friday by tearing into Hollywood for turning a blind eye to its "romanticization" of gun violence.
According to Fox News, Maher's emotional outpour came as liberals continue to call for gun control following a string of mass shootings in the United States.
"Now that we live in an age of uber-corporate responsibility where every large company in America bends over backwards to get on the politically correct side of every issue, Hollywood has to tell us- why does that not include gun violence?" he began.
Maher continued, "When liberals scream, 'Do something!' after a mass shooting, why aren't we also dealing with the fact that the average American kid sees 200,000 acts of violence on screens before the age of 18 and that according to the FBI, one of the warning signs of a potential school shooter is 'a fascination with violence-filled entertainment?'"
"It's funny, Hollywood is the wokest place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility. They have intimacy coordinators on set to chaperone sex scenes, they hire sensitivity readers to go through and edit scripts, Disney stood up to the 'Don't Say Gay' law, another studio spent $10 million to digitally remove Kevin Spacey from a movie, but when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence, crickets. Weird. The only thing we don't call a trigger is the one that actually has a trigger," Maher told viewers, reported Fox News.
The HBO star complained how "bad things" can't be platformed like ethnic stereotypes and fat-shaming, but a hero in a movie "getting over a grudge by mowing down a multitude of human beings" is still allowed. "Because no impressionable young man would ever imitate that," Maher quipped showing the mugshots of infamous mass shooters on-screen.
While allowing that he's not in favour of censorship or organizing society around "what crazy people might do," Maher noted, "Every bad thought in all of these movies is how to get revenge."
He stated Part of the issue is that the good guys can shoot endless amounts of bad guys, but never seem to pay major consequences themselves. "The worst that will happen to you is you have to sit beside the ambulance with a blanket."
As per Deadline, earlier, Maher talked with Dr Cornel West, a Princeton professor whose lament was that politics is about "the superficial and the spectacle." He also defended the teaching of Western-centric humanities classes but equivocated when asked whether things like mathematics reflect white perspectives too much.