Les Jones

Guns > MTV's "I'm a Gun Owner"

SayUncle has been following the MTV special "I'm a Gun Owner." The show featured four people - two criminals, one crime victim, and one legitimate gun owner. That alone put things badly out of balance - most criminals don't think of themselves as gun owners, for starters, and most of this country's 80 million gun owners are law-abiding citizens.

Now Uncle has a letter from the mother of the girl featured as the gun owner. It dismisses many of the false implications MTV made in their editing.

1) My daughter is 23 years old. The filming for the MTV show was done in July through October of 2004 – at the time she was 22 years old. I do not have any idea why the episode took over a year to get on the air. We were initially given an air date of October 2004, yet despite that, it didn’t make its way to the show until December 2005. None-the-less, she was certainly of legal age even a year and a half ago to obtain a CHP (which she has, legally, despite the fact that although they filmed her receiving it – this was not shown on the air)

2) As for the segment which showed her putting the gun into her purse and then immediately showed her in the bar, there was a great deal of footage left out between the two segments – the most significant being that which showed her putting the gun into her glove compartment and explaining to the film crew that you could not legally carry a gun into a bar. As for her drinking – at no time was my daughter armed while consuming alcoholic beverages. Once again, what couldn’t of course be shown, as it was not in keeping with the message of the film, was the fact that she was not alone the night the gun was put into the glove compartment, nor was she in possession of the firearm at any time after the point she walked into the bar.

There's a show (on VH1, I think) called something like "Behind Reality TV." It's mostly lame, but one interesting part showed scenes from VH1's "The Surreal Life." Things weren't spicy enough for the producers, so they sexed things up by faking scenes. When Erik Estrada flashes open his bathrobe, they block out his genital area. When you see the unedited footage he's actually wearing underwear. They just wanted to imply he was showing the camera his pet squirrel.

On another episode, Ron Jeremy takes off his swim trunks and slips into the hottub with some topless women. You'd think that would be sexy enough, but no. The next thing you see is Tammy Faye Baker looking in his direction. In reality she had already gone to bed before Jeremy went all in and the producers merely edited footage to suggest Tammy Faye was eyeing the Hedgehog's junk.

MTV's "I'm a Gun Owner" seems to have been a reality TV show posing as a documentary.