A film review titled “Jeremy Kagan’s ‘Shot’ Is a Sobering Plea for Gun Control” is like so many others. It believes that films can create whatever “positive” change the reviewer likes without having to acknowledge that films showing the opposite end of the spectrum have any responsibility for anything. It’s a rather hypocritical position to take if you think about it.

The review starts by saying:

With the number of people shot by illegally-owned guns growing daily, it’s refreshing to see a responsible cinematic plea for gun control. Shot is sobering, suspenseful and exemplary.

The always excellent and under-valued Noah Wyle plays a film editor named Mark Newman who, in the midst of trying to save a crumbling marriage and dealing with the pressure of a sudden deadline imposed by a demanding producer, takes a walk with his wife Phoebe (a marvelous Sharon Leal) and pauses on a street corner to discuss the the options of breaking up. Like a lightning bolt, a teenager across the street named Miguel playing with an illegal firearm owned by his cousin, inadvertently pulls the trigger, fires the gun, and Mark is hit in the chest by a single bullet. It’s just an accident, but who’s going to believe a 17-year-old black kid? A witness calls 911, an army of police cars with sirens howling sweeps down upon the scene, and Miguel panics and runs. The rest of the film tells parallel stories about Mark’s fight for life and the boy’s fear, confusion, and frustration as he tosses the gun, avoids detection, and tries desperately to find someone to give him the right advice.

Miguel is not a hood, but when his priest counsels him to do the right thing, call the police and tell the truth, his mother forbids him to get involved and his friends and relatives turn their backs on him.

This “Miguel” isn’t a hood, but he’s a 17-year-old playing with his cousin’s gun? Out in public, where anyone with a lick of sense knows such things are probably not a good idea? Why is a 17-year-old kid handling an illegal gun if he’s not a hood or a hood-in-the-making?

However, rather than a “sobering plea for gun control” as the reviewer thinks it is, this movie is more a testimony to the ineffectiveness of our gun laws as they stand.

After all, isn’t it already acknowledged that Miguel’s cousin owned an illegal gun? If gun laws work so well, how did the cousin get it?

Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to pontificate to the rest of us what we should be thinking by selectively providing “thoughtful” movies like this while ignoring the legion of movies they present showing the most disreputable of people possible as heroic anti-heroes. Drug dealers, gangbangers, dirty cops, anything and everything we want nothing to do with in real life are common fodder for film.

So please forgive me if I lump this Miguel in with the fictional monsters in that they’ll get no sympathy from me. For one, they’re fiction. For another, I don’t really care what the Hollywood Hypocrites think I should believe regarding guns in this country or much of anything else, for that matter.