The Consequence That Came From the Gun Industry, Not This One

Two industries watched the same video. Only one of them did anything about it.

The facts are not in dispute, because they were reported at length by Los Angeles Magazine and never contradicted. In January 2020, during the SHOT Show trade convention, video surfaced of Taran Butler — the competition shooter whose Simi Valley range has trained a generation of action stars, and whose customized weapons run through the John Wick franchise — making sexual comments to Jade Struck, a shooter on his own team who had been barely eighteen when the footage was recorded. He asked her, in a cartoon voice, to show him her “precious.” She would later say she had been “very young and naive and led to believe that this sort of thing was normal, expected and required to succeed in this industry.”

Butler posted an apology calling his own conduct “indefensible” and a “painful lesson.” Then he deleted it, and accused the young woman of playing victim.

What happened next is the part worth studying, because it is a controlled experiment that nobody meant to run.

The firearms industry — the industry this town reliably casts as the republic of no accountability — moved inside a month. Benelli, the Italian shotgun house, ended its sponsorship. So did Trijicon, the optics maker. Neither issued a press release or convened a panel. A man on their payroll was recorded demeaning a teenage employee, and they concluded, quietly and permanently, that he should no longer be on their payroll. That is what enforcement of a standard looks like when the standard is real: undramatic, unannounced, and done.

And Hollywood? Hollywood — the industry that had spent the preceding three years telling the world it had reformed itself; the industry of the pledge, the initiative, the inclusion rider, the standards-and-practices memo — did nothing at all. The trades that exist to cover this business never ran a word. The A-list kept booking the range. The franchise work continued without a hiccup. Six years on, the same publicists who would incinerate a mid-level executive for a bad joke in a marketing meeting still route their clients to Simi Valley, and the town's institutional memory has decided the videotape never existed.

This is not an argument that Butler should have been erased; this masthead does not do erasure. It is an argument about selective enforcement, and about who gets to claim the moral high ground between two industries that this town has firmly ranked. The gun business looked at the tape and accepted a cost — walked away from its most bankable crossover celebrity — because the conduct violated something it actually believed. The entertainment business looked at the same tape and ran the other calculation, the one it always runs: he is useful, she is not famous, and the story has no distributor.

MeToo, we were told, was a permanent change in how this industry treats the young people who work at the bottom of its call sheets. Perhaps. But a movement that can end a career over an allegation in one zip code, while a videotape changes nothing in another, is not applying a principle. It is applying leverage — enforced precisely to the degree that the target is expendable and suspended precisely at the point where enforcement would cost the enforcers something they want.

The gun industry wanted things from Taran Butler too. It gave them up. Until the people who run this business can say the same, they should retire the sermon.

The Editors’ Desk is the opinion of Signal Fire Daily. The factual record above — the January 2020 video, the apology and its deletion, the ended Benelli and Trijicon sponsorships, and Hollywood’s continued engagement — is drawn from Los Angeles Magazine’s reporting and contemporaneous public accounts; the characterizations and conclusions are ours alone. Corrections: corrections@readsignalfire.com.