Aw, shoot!
Jim Carrey may hail from Canada, but he's one of America's biggest stars. Carrey has also been a US citizen since 2004, and is throwing his celebrity behind the push for more serious gun control.
Jim Carrey did a "Hee Haw" spoof video for Funny or Die, in which he looks a lot like Bruce Campbell as he impersonates the late Charlton Heston. In the video, Carrey-as-Heston watches Jim Carrey-as-a-country-singer (along with American alt-rock band The Eels) perform a song called "Cold Dead Hand", echoing Charlton Heston's most famous quote.
"Jim Carrey" and "subtle" are rarely used in the same sentence. If that video were made by Eternal-Sunshine-of-theSpotless-Mind Jim Carrey rather than Ace-Ventura Jim Carrey, would it have gone as viral? Probably not. That guy knows what works; he knows his audience.
Pushback for such a video was virtually guaranteed, and so it came to pass. That's what happens when you imply that Charlton Heston's firearms advocacy has kept him out of Heaven.
Fox News (which also knows its audience) raked Carrey over the coals for the video, as it was a direct shot at the network's core viewership. Jim Carrey shot back,
“Since I released my “Cold Dead Hand” video on Funny or Die this week, I have watched Fux News rant, rave, bare its fangs and viciously slander me because of my stand against large magazines and assault rifles. I would take them to task legally if I felt they were worth my time or that anyone with a brain in their head could actually fall for such irresponsible buffoonery. That would gain them far too much attention which is all they really care about.
I’ll just say this: in my opinion Fux News is a last resort for kinda-sorta-almost-journalists whose options have been severely limited by their extreme and intolerant views; a media colostomy bag that has begun to burst at the seams and should be emptied before it becomes a public health issue.I sincerely believe that in time, good people will lose patience with the petty and poisonous behavior of these bullies and Fux News will be remembered as nothing more than a giant culture fart that no amount of Garlique could cure.
I wish them all the luck that accompanies such malevolence.”
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.