In video gaming, shooters still top the lists, but sales of some, including the various iterations of Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, have softened by as much as 4 percent (gaming companies like Gamasutra are notoriously coy when it comes to reporting sales figures). There’s no doubt that teenage boys and girls like to blow off steam with games like Hitman: Absolution, but when you look at the bestseller lists, you find they’re also loaded with sports games like Farza Motorsport 4 and Madden NFL. Old standbys like Super Mario Brothers and Pokémon enjoy perennial success. When it comes to Wii, the 2012 bestseller was a pop-music sweetie called Just Dance 4. I’d be willing to bet no kid, no matter how disturbed, was inspired to go out and shoot up a classroom by boogeying around his living room to “Moves Like Jagger.”
There are violent programs on television — Breaking Bad, Justified, and Boardwalk Empire all come to mind — but the only one that seems to appeal to teens is AMC’s The Walking Dead. There’s plenty of gunplay in that one, but almost all of it is directed at people who have already expired. The Nielsen ratings for the pre-Christmas week of 2012 shows football, football, and more football (violence, yes; guns, no). There were also two sitcoms and three CBS detective shows, two from the NCIS franchise, where the emphasis is on detection.
The message is clear: Americans have very little interest in entertainment featuring gunplay. In the 1980s, filmmakers even introduced a new ratings category, PG-13, to protect younger children from graphic violence. The first film to be so rated was the original Red Dawn, and I would argue that it and all the PG-13 shooters that have followed propagate their own form of gun-porn by suggesting that shooting people equals wholesome adventure, and by refusing to acknowledge what happens to people who take a bullet in the stomach or the head. There’s little or no blood in films like Skyfall, and certainly no torn flesh — show those things and you get slapped with an R, which keeps millions of early adolescents from getting past the box office (contrary to the belief of many conservatives who go to the movies but once a year, exhibitors tend to be quite strict about enforcing the R rating). The result has been action movies that hark back to the old Hopalong Cassidy days, where the baddie would simply clutch his chest and topple over. All very sanitary.
As my gun-toting friends will tell you, real death by gunshot isn’t like that. If you want to see what it is like, check out Sam Peckinpah’s Western, The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah shows more realistic consequences of gun violence. It’s not pretty, and that’s putting it mildly. A large-caliber gunshot wound is horrifying. If you think the outcry against guns was loud following Sandy Hook, imagine what it would have been like had the public been exposed to pictures of what those gore-splattered rooms and hallways looked like when the first responders entered them.
The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America’s propaganda-savvy gun-pimps. It’s believed by people who don’t read novels, play video games, or go to many movies. People actually in touch with the culture understand that what Americans really want (besides knowing all about Princess Kate’s pregnancy) is The Lion King on Broadway, a foul-talking stuffed toy named Ted at the movies, Two and a Half Men on TV, Words with Friends on their iPads, and Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindles. To claim that America’s “culture of violence” is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.
V. From My Cold Dead Hands
When I think of the politically conservative gun enthusiasts who are opposed to any form of gun control, no matter how many innocents die in acts of gun violence, I remember something a Democratic member of the House of Representatives is reputed to have said about Gerald Ford: “If he saw a hungry child as he walked to work, he would give that child his bag lunch without hesitation, then go ahead and vote against school lunch subsidies without ever seeing the contradiction.”
Most anti-control firearms enthusiasts have similarly split personalities, and the slogan you sometimes see pasted to the bumpers of their station wagons, campers, and SUVs — YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS — does not make them bad people. It only makes them walking contradictions, and which of us does not have a few contradictions in our personalities?
Most Americans who insist upon their right to own as many guns (and of as many types) as they want see themselves as independent folk who stand on their own two feet; they may send food or clothes to the victims of a natural disaster, but they sure-God don’t want charity themselves. They are, by and large, decent citizens who help their neighbors, do volunteer work in the community, and would not hesitate to stop and help a stranger broke down by the side of the road. They are more apt to vote for increasing law enforcement funds than they are for increasing school improvement funds, reasoning (and not without some logic) that keeping kids safe is more important than getting them new desks. They have no problem with drug and alcohol recovery centers … as long as they are in someone else’s neighborhood. They can weep for the dead children and bereft parents of Sandy Hook, then wipe their eyes and write their congressmen and women about the importance of preserving the right to bear arms.
They declare they must keep those arms — not excluding those of the semi-automatic type — for home defense. They’re plenty worried about home defense. They see the world as a fundamentally dangerous place and their homes as castles that crazy people of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre type may try to invade at any time. Ask them if they have ever actually been a victim of a home invasion, and most will say no. And yet all of them know of someone who has been thus victimized. If only they’d had a gun, they’re apt to mourn.
Sometimes they do. In late 1959, two drifters, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, invaded the Kansas home of farmer Herbert Clutter, looking for money they believed Clutter kept in a safe. They killed Clutter, his wife, and the two Clutter children still living at home. Clutter had guns, but was unable to get to them; so far as we know, he never even tried. Most home invasion victims with arms find themselves in Herbert Clutter’s position: surprised and overwhelmed. Unless you sleep with your .45 auto fully loaded and under your pillow, you’re apt to find yourself in the same position if the bad guys ever should show up in your bedroom, enquiring as to the location of your safe.