'Mixed-ish' miss the mark with its reference to the second amendment in the water gun scene
The second spinoff of 'Black-ish', 'Mixed-ish' premiered last week. Narrated by the adult Bow Jackson (Tracee Ellis Ross), the show chronicles her childhood, beginning from when her family leaves a post-racial, utopian commune to live in the outside world with Bow's paternal grandfather, Harrison Jackson III (Gary Cole).
Bow's grandfather is everything her father Paul was against — capitalism, guns, and more. When Harrison tries to bond with his grandkids, he gets them water guns.
The episode ends with a colorful montage of the family playing with the water guns and Santamonica holding hers up and yelling "I love the second amendment".
Yikes! At a time when entire shows are being pulled out and canceled without airing in the wake of mass shootings and when gun control forms a big part of social debate, these are questionable words that the writers have chosen to be uttered by a seven-year-old girl.
In fact, just a few days before the episode aired, non-profit organization Sandy Hook Promise (created in the wake of the shooting at the elementary school) released a PSA skit.
In the skit, kids talk about their back-to-school items which then shifts to them running and hiding for their lives with gunshots and screams heard in the background.
Mass shootings are not a 21st Century phenomena. The eighth deadliest mass shooting happened in 1984, just a year prior to the one in which 'Mixed-ish' is set — a shooting at a McDonald's in San Diego that killed 21 people.
Two years after that, a shooting at a post office in Oklahoma killed 14 people. It was in the 80s that gun ownership was largely advocated as equating to freedom and in 1986, the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act passed.
The Act succeeded in enacting a largely self-enforcing, comparatively lax set of regulations that included the reintroduction of interstate sales of firearms and a reduction in the number of gun dealer inspections.
It also prohibited the government from keeping a national registry of gun owners. A schoolyard shooting in California in 1989 that killed five children then prompted the state to ban possession of semiautomatic assault weapons.
So yes, the show did take a misstep when they aired that scene — a water gun fight scene without those words uttered would have been easy to do and the line seems quite out-of-touch for a show that wants to portray racial issues in the 80s. 'Mixed-ish' airs on Tuesday nights on ABC.