Angry in the Great White North

First watch the video:

Update: War Child Canada has responded to explain just how carefully the video was managed.

Here's what the Toronto Star had to say about Camp Okutta:

A curly-haired camp counsellor, in front of a row of nervous children, throws a stone onto a patch of open grass. Nothing. He throws another. A mine explodes. The kids shudder.

"There were 12. Now there are 11 out there," the counsellor says. "Can you guys try and cross for me?"

Welcome to Camp Okutta's minefield – due south of its grenade pit and shooting range – in Aurora, just outside of Toronto.

The camp is not real, certainly.

But War Child Canada's provocative new ad campaign on child soldiers is meant to show that camps like this do exist, across the world, and Canadians tolerate them because the children are not ours. "The goal is to provoke a reaction," said Samantha Nutt, War Child Canada's founder and executive director. "Why is it that we're so profoundly shocked and upset to see this in the Canadian context and yet when it happens in other parts of the world, we take it for granted as part of normal life?"

Now before I comment on what we've just seen, consider this story out of New Mexico about the new CBS reality program, Kid Nation:

The New Mexico attorney general has reopened an investigation into whether the CBS reality show “Kid Nation” violated the state’s child-labor laws and other state regulations governing the welfare of children, a spokesman for the attorney general said on Thursday.

“Kid Nation,” which is scheduled to have its premiere on Sept. 19, is a reality show that takes 40 children ages 8 to 15 to a New Mexico desert ghost town south of Santa Fe for 40 days and challenges them to build an adult-free society. Several children were injured during the production; four children drank bleach from an unmarked soda bottle and another was burned on her face with hot grease while cooking in an unsupervised kitchen.

Now go back to the scene with the kids opening up with AK-47s on the target range.

Remember, this was shot in Ontario, just north of Toronto.

I didn't see protective eye gear or hearing protection. I didn't see protection against ejected shell casings burning the adjacent kid on the firing line. Blanks or not, those shells casings will burn you. Soldiers training with blanks are required to maintain a longer distance between each other on the range. If a kid lost control of his or her weapon and fired at another kid at close range, the effects would have been terrible. The discharge from a blank will cause severe burns or even kill if you're unlucky enough.

The blonde girl wasn't even looking down range when she was firing, maintaining some semblance of aim. She was looking at the stock as it was hitting her shoulder.

I wonder how many bruised shoulders this video created.

Bottom line is it looks like these kids were put at risk of being harmed in order to make this viral video.

The point of the video was to shock me out of my complacency by showing white kids acting as soldiers. I noticed only one black kid in the video, and he never throws a grenade or fires a rifle. Well, the parody was so obvious that I wasn't shocked at all, at least not the way War Child Canada had hoped.

First off, War Child Canada is going to have try harder to displace environmentalism as the cause celebre in Canada.

Second, my sense of shock was only in that War Child Canada and John St Advertising got away with this. Just who was supervising this shoot and thought it was a good idea to give these kids assault rifles to fire without protective gear?

Was anyone monitoring this?

I watched that video one more time. Go back to the grenade sequence when they crouch behind the park bench. Obviously the explosions are caused by special effects charges buried in the ground before the props were thrown, but did you notice the dirt getting past the bench and onto the kids in the front of the group?

Just some dirt. Lucky the worst that could happen is some dust gets in your eye. Of course, if the charge malfunctioned, or was sized incorrectly, or had the explosion sent a rock flying or one of the prop grenades shooting back to the "trainees", the fact that the dirt hit those kids shows that they weren't sufficiently protected on this set.

Someone ought to be asking some serious questions about this.

Update: The question of the muzzle flash was raised. Seeing such prominent muzzle flash made sense for props. Real bullets don't generate much muzzle flash. Blanks do. A real cartridge is designed to expend just about all the charge in the time it takes to push the bullet out of the barrel. That makes sense when you think about it. Burning gunpowder beyond the confines of the barrel is a waste of resources since it no longer contributes to making the bullet go faster. The light emitted (the flash) is a dead giveaway to your location. Finally, it's dangerous (yes, it seems silly to talk about danger at the business end of an assault rife, but the point is to created directed and focused danger for anyone in front of the bullet, and little or no danger for anyone else).

A blank, on the other hand, has a wad in place of a bullet. When it leaves the barrel, it disintegrates and burns up. That is for safety since if it didn't disintegrate and kept flying forward, it would be a bullet. It is also for effect. A rifle firing real bullets is visually rather boring, and movie directors like exciting visuals. A rifle firing blanks that cause big bursts of light at the muzzle looks cool and tells the viewer "This guy is shooting his gun!"

Blanks or bullets, you still have the problem of cartridges. Here is a video of an AK-47 ejecting cartridges:

The cartridge is not small and it's moving very fast. It's also very hot. Touch one of those and you'll get a nasty burn. Now in this case, the cover is removed from the rifle to show the inner workings. That means the cartridges are being ejected abnormally. Nevertheless, the spent cartridge needs to be ejected and thrown a safe distance away from the person firing the rifle. That's a requirement. A rain of smoking hot metal falling on your trigger hand and on your leg would play havoc with the accuracy of your shots.

Here is a video of an AK-47 being demonstrated by enthusiasts in the woods -- the same setting as War Child Canada video:

No muzzle flash visible at all. That's a hallmark of firing real rounds. The kids video was flashy. Exactly what I'd expected for real rifles firing blanks (and not some sort of post production CGI thing).

Take note of the use of proper hearing protection by the guys in the video (foam plugs don't cut it).