It's the Christmas season and I just watched one of the Christmas episodes of Dragnet. This from 1952.
Joe Friday always seemed like a bit of a fascist, but I don't think that was the case.
In this episode, it's a few days before Christmas. Joe Friday is working homicide. They get a call. There's a missing nine-year-old boy. Blood and a .22 shell casing was found in his back yard.
"Blood stains and a cartridge."
"It could mean a hundred things."
"You have any ideas, Friday?"
"Just one and I don't like it."
The blood is found to be the same type as the missing kid's. And another kid is missing. An eight-year-old playmate.
"Do you have any guns in the house?"
Just a .45 automatic. Oh, and yes, a rifle they got the kid for Christmas, but they haven't given it to him. It's wrapped up in the closet.
Turns out the kid had found package and opened it. He and his friend were playing with the rifle. The other kid shot himself accidentally.
"What's it all prove, Joe?"
"You don't give a kid a gun for Christmas."
The National Rifle Association was outraged. They launched a letter writing campaign against Dragnet. Jack Webb passed the letters on to the Chief of Police who made a public statement that he hoped they did more shows exposing the idiocy of giving guns to children.
Would you see a TV episode like this today? Such a depressing Christmas episode. The death of a child is a subject few shows would touch. Jack Webb stood up to the NRA, and there was no attempt to be "even-handed", giving the pro-firearm fatality side of things.
It shows how bad things have gotten that Dragnet, 1952, would be too radical for today's viewers.
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I’m skeptical that this happened as described on Wikipedia, if it even happened at all. Curiously, the entire Christmas story anecdote has no source footnoted for it, AND the fact that there is no source attributed is not even flagged by Wikipedia (as it often is.) The NRA didn’t morph into the right-wing political animal it is today until around the 1970s, and you didn’t have big culture wars on guns happening in the 40s/50s like you do today. Thus I doubt that late 1940s/early 1950s NRA would have cared that someone was pointing out the danger of giving guns to children. Im willing to be convinced if someone cites a primary source, but there’s something anachronistic feeling about the story so I will continue to doubt it until then.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous here again: The story has been verified by a primary source: Time Magazine from 1950: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,820595,00.html
ReplyDeleteAlso the Wikipedia article did cite a book, but in the text, not via footnote (at least not that I saw.)
I would just caution reading today’s controversies with the NRA back onto the 1950s NRA. That’s not a defense of them by any means, but the NRA probably did not have the cultural power to attempt a takedown of Dragnet, for example. And one must remember the cultural context was different. My grandma was born in 1938 in the Midwest, and her father hunted for rabbits to feed his family. The end of the depression was well within living memory in 1950, and people having guns in the house used to feed their families was still a thing. Thus rural America would have viewed guns as more functional than urban America would have, thus the episode’s moral of keeping guns away from kids totally would not have resonated with people who reflexively used guns for hunting, which would obviously involve teaching kids to do so once they got to a certain age. Again, I’m not defending, not justifying, just seeking to understand. It’s possible an organization like the NRA would have been more rural minded and would have wanted the episode to talk more about gun safety, since guns were more ubiquitous, willy nilly, in the homes of rural Americans.