Debra Messing apologizes for gun safety selfie at time of UCLA shooting
Debra Messing is involved with the same charity for gun safety and awareness which Julianne Moore supports: Everytown for Gun Safety. The way Moore has explained it, Everytown has some very practical solutions to control access to guns, namely running background checks and closing the loopholes which exist for gun shows and online sales. Incidentally Obama issued an executive order earlier this year to accomplish this, but without the support of the legislative branch it will be hard to effect change. Hopefully we can see some of these changes under President Clinton. (Yes I’m an optimist on several fronts.) Wednesday there was a tragic shooting at UCLA, which ended up being a murder suicide in which a man from Minnesota murdered his former engineering professor, William S. Klug. The latest in that terrible case is that the shooter also murdered his estranged wife in Minnesota before driving to Los Angeles, where he intended to kill Klug and another professor, who was not harmed. It was yet another senseless shooting which organizations like Everytown hope to prevent. Messing was taking part in a pre-planned awareness day for gun safety, and so instead of putting it off or just tweeting support for the victims at UCLA, she decided to incorporate the shootings into her selfie, and the result was… not good. She posted a photo of herself in a gun control T-shirt and tweeted that she was watching the shooting on TV. (She’s since deleted the tweet but the NY Daily News had it.) Yes that came across as self absorbed. At least she didn’t use a bunch of hashtags though, props for that. Many people started calling her out for it and the good news is that she apologized. Here’s her apology. I would assume that someone else wrote it for her, judging by her tweets. PLEASE READ: pic.twitter.com/LccmvPpOcn — Debra Messing (@DebraMessing) June 1, 2016 If that was the case why didn’t Messing just tweet a simple message that she was saddened by events at UCLA, that she hopes everyone is safe and her thoughts go out to the families and loved ones? Instead she made it about herself and it was tone deaf, but it does make sense in context. Just before posting her full apology, Messing posted a series of tweets explaining herself, stating “The pix was being taken just AS the news broke. I thought the horrendous irony of the timing shown [sic] a brighter light in the crisis and need for all of us to do something together to make the US safer. Sorry if it was misconstrued and caused offense. That’s the last thing I want to do.” As far as celebrity apologies go, her full apology is a decent one. I wish celebrities wouldn’t use the “sorry you misunderstood/sorry you were offended” line. She should have just said “I messed up, this was dumb and I acted in the heat of the moment,” but she explained the circumstances and it wasn’t bad. photos credit: WENN.com