The BBC informs me that Django Unchained‘s premiere has been canceled on account of the massacre in Newtown, CT. This is the second film to be delayed because of this tragedy – as far as I know – though it is certainly the more artistically significant of the two. I think this is a mistake. Let me explain.

Most of us don’t really know how to react when we hear about something like what happened in Sandy Hook. We are sad, angry, confused, and a myriad of other things. We don’t know how we should react because we are human beings and something like this appears to us to be inhuman. (Though it is in fact very normal for human beings, when human history is taken as a whole.)

We expect corporations to behave a little more rationally – or coolly, depending on your point of view. And so an emotional decision such as this  – in this case to cancel a premiere of a work of art because that work of art appears, on some level, to be connected to a tragedy – does not seem to be the kind of thing I would expect of a corporation, were it rational. Of course corporations are run by people and so do not actually behave rationally either. (If anything, they behave even more irrationally.)

But the point of this is that canceling the premier of the latest film by one of the great American directors of his era – no more than delaying the release of an action film that probably cannot be seriously considered as anything more than casual entertainment – will not prevent further mass-shootings; nor will it somehow honour the victims of this tragedy or their relatives.

What would help to prevent such tragedies from recurring so frequently in the United States – where they are the most frequent of any “developed” country” – would be if the corporations behind Django Unchained and Jack Reacher, and the people working for those corporations and / or responsible for those films – and frankly anyone else who feels they must self-censor “violent” art and entertainment in response to this tragedy – would use the time and energy they put into deciding to delay these films, and the considerable financial resources at their disposal, to destroy the gun lobby in the United States. And when I say destroy the gun lobby, I don’t mean in a physical sense. I mean, rather, “destroy” in the manner in which Joseph Welch destroyed Joe McCarthy. There is no human decency connected with those who demand the freedom to bear any and all guns despite all the evidence that such “rights” lead to more frequent mass-shootings. This position is unconscionable. It has always been unconscionable to anyone who wasn’t indoctrinated by their parents or community to love shooting.

Instead of delaying film premieres, these people and companies could instead be lobbying federal, state and municipal governments – through money and through filmed advertising and through any other means they can find – to change the laws that create the circumstances where massacres like this happen twice in one year. That would be a rational – and correct – but also a human response to this tragedy. Self-censorship is just putting our hands over our eyes and hoping it doesn’t happen again.