Actress Julianne Moore has launched a campaign she insists is aimed at raising gun-safety awareness and enacting enhanced background checks for those seeking to purchase firearms.
On October 13, People magazine reported that Moore started her group Everytown Creative Council -- which consists of members of the "creative community" and is affiliated with gun-rights opponent Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown Gun Safety -- because she is "shocked and saddened by the loss of life, and the daily increase of gun violence in our beautiful country."
The Oscar-winning performer told People:
As actors, we are citizens first so we believe in the Constitution and the Second Amendment…But 92 percent of the people in the United States are in favor of background checks, too, so I don't feel like I'm in the minority. I definitely feel like I'm in the majority here.
Moore then invoked a ludicrous comparison of gun ownership – an individual right guaranteed explicitly by the Constitution -- to operating a motor vehicle on a public highway, something not constitutionally protected as an individual right:
This year it's expected that gun deaths will overtake traffic fatalities in America…For cars, you have to have training and you have to have a license, and you wear seat belts and we have airbags and we have all of these things in place that have reduced fatalities unbelievably…And it was a totally unregulated industry at first. I feel like something that is very sensible and straight forward can be done also with guns.
So far, there have been 80 Hollywood stars that signed Everytown Creative Council’s pledge of promising to use their "creativity and visibility to help drive real change."
