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GOVERNMENT —  FORMER 'BRAIN DEAD LIBERAL' FILMMAKER PENS SCATHING COLUMN ON GUN CONTROL: 'A POLITICAL APPEAL TO THE IGNORANT'

Jan. 26, 2013 8:04pm Erica Ritz

David Mamet, writer/director/executive producer of the film “Phil Spector,” addresses reporters during the HBO Winter TCA Press Tour at the Langham Huntington Hotel on Friday, Jan. 4, 2013, in Pasadena, Calif. (Photo: AP)

Pulitzer Award-winning author, producer and director David Mamet has been extremely open about his conversion from “brain dead liberal” to conservative, and in the wake of President Obama’s latest push for stricter gun control measures, Mamet has penned ye another column setting the record straight as he sees it.


In an article for Newsweek, the writer of “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Hannibal” beings with a cutting analysis of centralized government (all subsequent emphasis added):

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability:the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

Mamet proceeds to tackle gun control head-on, writing:

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.