Brain-damaged\nby a beating he received as an abused child, the guy who will later become\nBatman\u2019s nemesis is a loner with strange habits who not only never receives the\napproval he craves, but instead is abused by all around him, including a\ngovernment which abandons him via budget cuts and leaves him without counseling\nor psyche meds. He gets stomped, with his crotch and ribs kicked in by a bunch\nof street punks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\nstoryline riffs on the Bernhard Goetz shooting in New York City in the 1980s. A\nyoung man who had been mugged and denied a carry permit illegally acquired a\nSmith & Wesson Chief Special .38 to carry, and when surrounded on a subway\ncar by four young black muggers, put a bullet into each and fled at the next\nsubway stop. None died, though one was paralyzed for life, and by the time\nGoetz turned himself in, he had become a hero among New Yorkers who were fed up\nwith the street crime which was rampant in that city at that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJoker\u201d is\nset in Gotham City, plainly an analog for NYC, supposedly in 1981. The Joker is on a subway car when he is\nassaulted by a trio of drunken, entitled white Yuppies who beat him without\nmercy. He draws his<\/em> Smith &\nWesson Chief Special and proceeds to shoot all three in self-defense, killing two\nand hitting the third in the leg. At that <\/em>subway car\u2019s next stop, the\nwounded one flees and the Joker pursues, shooting him in the back and then\nstanding over him to deliver a coup de grace, <\/em>turning self-defense to\nmurder. <\/em>He escapes, and the incident triggers a supportive \u201ckill the\nrich\u201d response in the city. I suspect\nMillennial-age viewers won\u2019t get the contorted parallel to the Goetz case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike\nGoetz, however, the Joker then goes on a murder spree. The guy who gave him the\ngun and lied about it is stabbed to death (throat and eye) by the Joker.\nLearning that his elderly, beloved mother had lied to him about many things, he\nsmothers her in her hospital bed, and then shoots to death on camera a local TV\ncomedian who has mocked him. Before he\nis captured and sent to the asylum, the Joker has become a hero to rioting\n\u201chave-nots.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie is\nvery well acted and filmed, and I\u2019m sure those who predict Oscars for it are\ncorrect. To me, the message is that when the media glorifies someone who kills,\nit sets the stage for more violence to happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course,\nwe gun nerds always look at details. The Chief Special is a five-shot revolver.\nIn the actual Goetz case, the gun was emptied with one bullet going into the\nceiling of the subway car and one apiece into each of his attackers. Without being seen to reload, the Joker\nmanages to get considerably more than five shots out of his <\/em>Chief\nSpecial, but hey, we shooters get picky about that sort of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The color\nscheme of the patrol cars is true to NYPD, but the cops\u2019 uniform shirts are\nwrong for that department during that period, as are the duty belts. And one thing I can\u2019t blame the movie for:\nInternet Movie Firearms Database, which is usually spot on for this sort of thing,\nmis-identified the Joker\u2019s gun as a Colt Detective Special. That\u2019s like mistaking Robert Mitchum\u2019s \u201957\nFord for a \u201957 Chevy in the movie \u201cThunder Road\u201d: just unacceptable to us\nnerds. http:\/\/www.imfdb.org\/wiki\/Joker_(2019)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve been hearing a lot about the hot new movie \u201cJoker,\u201d and how some theaters are hiring police guards for showings in case some nutcase is inspired by the movie to shoot up the audience. Having just seen it, that strikes me as a bit of a reach. What follows is a \u201cgun guy\u2019s\u201d perspective […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6005","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6008,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005\/revisions\/6008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-10.12.59-PM-1024x575.png\")
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