Harvey Weinstein stirred up gun rights advocates when he said on Howard Stern’s radio show that he plans to make a project that takes on the National Rifle Assn. and the issue of firearms “head on.”
“They are going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them,” Weinstein told Stern on Wednesday, referring to the NRA’s lobbying and political strength.
Weinstein did not go into specifics about the project, but said that Meryl Streep was involved and that it would not be a documentary but “a big movie like ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'”
“I don’t think we need guns in this country, and I hate it,” Weinstein told Stern. “The NRA is a disaster area.”
Such a movie is bound to be a political flashpoint, and Weinstein undoubtedly would open himself up to criticism over some of the violence in the movies he has produced, as well as his role as a prominent fundraiser for President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates.
Just his mention of the project drew criticism from some gun rights advocates, including Emily Miller of the Washington Times. In a column, she pointed out that Weinstein also told Stern that he wanted to move forward on a project about Jews defending themselves during the Holocaust. She wrote that Weinstein “does not seem to know that the Nazis were able to confiscate the guns that the Jewish people owned based on Germany’s government registry.”
“Mr. Weinstein has been watching too many movies if he thinks the good guys find fully loaded firearms in convenient locations to use only when necessary,” she wrote.
