|
 The group, named for former White House spokesman James Brady, who
was wounded in 1981 when a gunman tried to assassinate
then-President Ronald Reagan, rolled out the "Zero Minutes of Fame"
campaign earlier this week.
Its goal, the group said, was to promote research showing that mass
shooters, such as those who carried out the 2012 attacks in Newtown,
Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado, had studied past gun attacks
before carrying out their own.
The prominent use of the names and images of Adam Lanza, who shot
dead 20 children and six educators at a Newtown elementary school,
and James Holmes, who fatally shot 12 people at an Aurora movie
theater, in the two-minute online spot angered fellow
anti-gun-violence campaigners.
 The Brady Campaign's ad prompted a petition (http://chn.ge/1SCfovp)
on activist website Change.org calling for the ad to be taken down.
Some 93 people had signed that petition as of midday Friday.
"It was very hurtful to many gun violence victims and survivors,"
said Anita Busch, a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist whose
cousin was slain in the Aurora massacre and who said she posted the
petition. "For the Brady Campaign to not get it is just shocking,
honestly."
The ad marked the launch of a piece of software for Google's
<GOOGL.O> Chrome web browser that promised to remove the names and
images of serial killers from news accounts and Google web searches,
replacing them with "(name withheld out of respect for the
victims)."
[to top of second column] |
The Brady Campaign, one of the most prominent U.S. gun control
organizations, said on Friday it had cut back the ad's contents
after the complaints. A 14-second version of the ad viewed on Friday
featured no names or images of mass shooters.
"Our video was meant to educate the broader American public about
what we can do to prevent gun violence, not to upset those hardest
hit by it," Dan Gross, the group's president, said in an e-mailed
statement. "We take this matter seriously and hope the steps we have
taken to fix this are satisfactory to our victim advocates."
James Brady survived the 1981 attack and went on to become a
prominent gun control activist. He died in 2014.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Will Dunham)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
