A plea to filmmakers

The quote below gives the most interesting explanation I’ve seen of gun culture in the US.

“Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead.”

No matter your position on firearms, there is no point in scolding the opposite side since few if any people are ever convinced to join your side. It is a waste of time and energy. The grownups of America need to find a way to de-normalize violence in general. Guns happen allow a person to commit violence from a safe distance, plainly a reason for their popularity. Obviously, self-defense is a delicate spot, but if committing violence is not nearly viewed as normal by the broader population, the need to for lethal self-defense just might diminish a bit.

American gun culture as I see it is comprised of a spectrum of individuals ranging from violent criminals to paranoid militiamen to peaceful hunters and sport shooting enthusiasts. Criticism of gun culture should not bunch them together under one umbrella. Carefully chosen vocabulary should be used so as not to antagonize the more peaceful side of the spectrum.

When the European frontier was settled by stone age people 40 or 50 thousand years ago, there were no firearms. There were weapons that could only be energized by their personal strength. Fighting was more intimate in the sense that clubbing and jabbing had to be done up close to your adversary. Stoning could be done from a few steps back. Killing wounds led to exsanguination and a rapid death while others led to sepsis and a longer, agonizing death.

The invention and spread of gunpowder starting in 9^th century China led to the development of guns, cannons and, eventually, exploding projectiles. It was lost on no one that firearms enabled the projection of lethal force from a safer distance. The first really big war, World War I, in Europe was when advances like the Maxim recoil-operated machine gun and high explosives like picric acid were first put to large scale use. When the Maxim machine gun came out, many predicted that the mere appearance of the weapon would frighten the enemy into submission. Of course, it didn’t work and over the years the result was more and more efficient and mutual slaughter of opposing forces.

Male humans in particular have always been drawn to weapons and the martial arts. There are exceptions obviously, but men seem to take a shine to guns early in their lives. When asked why they like guns, they usually mention something about protection from intruders or perhaps just being a good guy with a gun in general. Often heard is the argument-terminating reminder of the 2^nd Amendment and the vow that their guns could be confiscated only from their cold, dead hands.

Some Americans do live their lives in dangerous places. With some training, having a handgun in the nightstand may indeed be necessary for protection. Speaking for myself, I have never lived anywhere that was so burdened with crime that I felt it was necessary to pack a handgun. So, I can’t criticize those who are threatened by crime.

What I can criticize, though, is the broader culture that idolizes the Hollywood image of a good guy (or gal) who resolves conflict with a firearm. We have the screenwriters to thank for this. They dream up the story arc in the screenplay to include some fancy gun play. Death is always immediate and without the off-putting cries of pain and writhing that comes with a serious wound.

Gunplay in European TV programming is much less common. I’ve watched TV police drama series from the UK, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Germany. The only significant shooting I’ve seen is in a show from Germany called Luna & Sophie. Surprise, surprise. It turns out that a compelling police drama screenplay can be written without a lot of shooting and gratuitous violence. Or even with none at all. Perhaps it is because guns are not very abundant in the general population in Europe.

An effect of repeated and detailed depictions of gun violence on TV is that it suggests that shooting people is, well, normal. It normalizes the notion that the shooter can be the judge, jury and executioner. Killing someone with a gun also bypasses all of that due process stuff that wastes so much time. We all know that this is a dramatic depiction and that shooting people in real life will have very serious consequences. In my idea of civilization, people would be safe without a firearm. But, this is a fantasy I never expect to see unless I move to Iceland.

Maybe you could say that gunplay on US television mostly depicts good guys with guns defeating bad guys with guns. I’ll agree, that is a positive spin. The problem lies with population distribution within a large group. It often happens that a classroom or a large population will distribute itself unevenly when certain measurable attributes like personality or other performance metrics are considered. It is referred to as the bell curve. In the ideal mathematical sense, there is the standard distribution. Below is an example of a bell-shaped curve of % of members of a population versus age.

What is interesting to note is that as the population increases in size and barring any other influences, you would expect the population of each of the individual age groups to grow in number, though not necessarily in percentage. The point is that as the population grows, so does the subgroup of younger criminals.

So, as the general population increases we can expect the population of criminals to grow as well.

Reality

Clearly, America is in a pickle. Mass shootings have been increasing in number, unlike with most other comparable nations. But with every mass shooting the cries for gun control go unanswered no matter the number of bloody dead children strewn about the floors of American schools. What can be done?

• Removing guns from citizens or blocking their ownership will not happen. This is completely unworkable and serious people know it. It will only lead to civil war.
• More laws and tougher sentences for gun-related crimes. This has been done and hasn’t solved the problem.
• Training teachers to shoot attackers. If you know many teachers, you know this is unworkable.
• The congress will accomplish absolutely nothing but handwringing.
• A president can do nothing without the support of the congress. Nothing will happen here.
• The gun lobby and the National Rifle Association will continue to spew their cold dead hands rhetoric, shouting down voices in favor of even the faintest of gun control remedies, regardless of the bloody mayhem happening.
• Citizens dedicated to maintaining the status quo with 2^nd Amendment hysterics will continue to shout, wave their flags and demand freedom.
• Republicans will continue to whip up hysteria by lying that gun rights are on the cusp of disappearing.
• Militiamen will continue to gather in the woods hoping for civil war.

The US has planted itself into a sort of cul-de-sac of violence and extremism in regard to the possession of needlessly powerful weapons and there seems to be no way out. There is no viable political action on the horizon. Instead, let’s forget the damned guns and look elsewhere.

A simple suggestion

In the US we are bathed in violence as entertainment. There were 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 according to the Centers for Disease Control. That is and average of 124 Americans dying per day from firearm-related injury.

While multiple factors can lead to violent actions, a growing body of literature shows a strong association between the perpetration of violence and exposure to violence in media, digital media, and entertainment

Credit: American Academy of Family Physicians, https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/violence-media-entertainment.html

I’m not sure that viewers are actually asking for all of the entertainment death that we see, it’s just that if it’s there we’ll eagerly watch it. It is easy to write screenplays with of violence in it. It definitely draws eyeballs which sells tickets, subscriptions and advertising. This is a reliable money machine.

What is needed is for screenwriters, producers and directors to back off on the violence just a bit. All of the violence on TV comes from the imagination of your writers. Surely it is within the writer’s power to throttle back a bit on the shooting, blood and guts.

A Plea to Filmmakers

Your advertisers know that a certain number of viewers are persuaded to buy their products because of advertising within your TV programming. If they are persuaded to buy widgets they probably don’t need, don’t you think that your portrayals of violence might also be effective in negatively influencing impressionable young people? Will half the violence really reduce your profits by half? Does reducing violent content really infringe on your creative freedom? How limited are your creative abilities that you must accurately portray the destruction of human life?