DC Trawler

Gov. Cuomo’s new gun laws might affect your enjoyment of “Blue Bloods” and whatnot

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No good deed goes unpunished. Nor does a stupid, pointless, self-evidently counterproductive one.

NYT:

The sweeping gun control measure signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and hailed by Democratic leaders has a surprising critic: Hollywood.

Officials in the movie and television industry say the new laws could prevent them from using the lifelike assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that they have employed in shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and films like “The Dark Knight Rises…”

“Weapons are part of our history as a culture as humans,” said Ryder Washburn, vice president of the Specialists Ltd., a leading supplier of firearms for productions that is based in Manhattan…

Mr. Cuomo has gone out of his way to promote the industry’s success; on Monday, he issued one news release to say the state was on track to break its record for the number of television pilots shot in a year, and another to say that “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” would begin production this week in Rochester…

Industry officials, though, say the state’s hastily developed gun control measures pose an unexpected challenge to their growing production business in New York — the possibility that fake police officers on television could be treated as real-life criminals…

Mr. Washburn, who recently finished filming “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” a movie starring Liam Neeson, at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, said Albany lawmakers should not underestimate how quickly one of the state’s most prosperous industries could shrink.

“Our generators are on wheels, our carts are on wheels, our trucks are on wheels,” he said. “Everything is on wheels, and it goes where it’s wanted.”

If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. So what’s your incentive to make it there?

A law that nobody really understood was hastily passed, and now it’s doing more harm than good. But what else is new?

Too bad, Hollywood. If the rest of us have to follow these stupid, useless laws, so do you. You’ll just need to figure out some way for your heroes to stop the bad guys without using guns.

Coming this fall to NBC: Law & Order: SVU (Scolding Very Urgently).

But hey, at least Cuomo did something, right? He made himself feel better, and he smugly condemned anybody who was skeptical. And that’s what’s really important.

Great job again, New York voters!