Antipiracy ‘trailer’ promoting the firing of guns into the air

I took my daughter to a movie in one of the SM malls last Sunday. Before watching a movie in theaters, viewers get to see a clip about movie piracy. It’s a short clip meant to look like a trailer of a movie. Derek Ramsay plays the lead as a policeman who stakes out a man who records movies in theaters. The man is caught in the act, a chase ensues and the “criminal” is cornered. All Derek has to do is cuff him but wait. Derek gets his gun and fires two shots into the air! What?

While this movie clip discourages piracy, I think it encourages a bigger crime of indiscriminately firing guns into the air. We have seen so many people, mostly children, who are hit by stray bullets because of this practice. Every New Year’s Eve, the Philippine National Police (PNP) goes on a big campaign to warn its ranks as well as gun holders about this very dangerous practice. Yet we allow Derek Ramsay to practice this crime every day in front of thousands of moviegoers, young and old, and be admired as a “macho” policeman.

Attention, Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, PNP, SM and other malls, Derek Ramsay: Take that movie clip out of our cinemas. It gives our people the wrong message that firing guns into the air is admirable! The other option is to put an epilogue in the movie clip and show two children being hit by the bullets and being taken to the hospital or to the morgue. With this epilogue, we might teach viewers the dangers of two crimes.

—GIGI CHUA, ggpadc@yahoo.com