Jim Carrey condemns Charlton Heston to Hell in 'Hee Haw' spoof video
Jim Carrey pulls no punches in the gun control debate. What a great Canadian.
As this is Jim Carrey we're talking about, and the Ace-Ventura version at that, we had to expect some poop jokes.
A few days later, Carrey switched to Eternal-Sunshine mode and wrote a more considered piece, aimed at Fox News' viewership rather than at Fox News itself. The op-ed is titled "I Never Wanted to Take Your Guns Away"; it's unclear how many Fox News viewers read the Huffington Post, but I reckon there's not a huge amount of crossover.
Upon reading Jim Carrey's op-ed, you may find yourself wondering, how can something so sane come from they guy whose website looks like this?
Carrey followed it up by tweeting just about every US Senator who's on Twitter.
Jim Carrey: Between Canada & the USA
Jim Carrey is a now-dual citizen, raised in Canada yet now living in America. It's no surprise that the USA has more guns per capita than any other country in the world, but it's not as if Canada is exactly unarmed: anywhere from a quarter to a third of Canadian households have at least one firearm. However, Canadians tend to kill themselves with their guns more often than they kill each other. Meanwhile, in the USA, guns kill nearly as many people as car crashes.
Canada was also a frontier country, later connected and mass-settled via a railway line. However, the wild-west mentality just didn't stick with Canada in quite the same way as it did south of the border, or perhaps Canadians are less afraid of a zombie invasion, and thus don't see the need to stockpile assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. Canadian filmmaker Paul Gross gently poked fun at this difference in mentality with his 2010 film "Gunless".
In the absence of a clear cause (or, more likely, causes) of this difference in outlook, it's quite easy to see how the United States' obsesssion with guns (and Charlton Heston's raised-rifle moment) would be seen as odd-- or even comical-- to those from outside its borders. As an American myself, I've yet to successfully explain to non-Americans why my home nation is so reticent to balance the right to bear arms with the right to survive a school day.
Is it any wonder that Carrey (or anyone else from outside the US) would draw a line connecting America's gun obsession with such an unflattering American stereotype as that depicted in "Hee Haw"?
But, hey, who cares what Jim Carrey thinks? He's just an actor. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And Ronald Reagan.