Guns (Kindle Single)

culture of Kardashian.
    Of the ten most popular works of fiction published in 2012,
only two feature any kind of violence: George R.R. Martin’s A Game of
Thrones (no guns, just swords) and John Grisham’s The Racketeer (your basic chase story, no shooting necessary). Gone Girl , by Gillian
Flynn, is a beautifully constructed mystery. The rest of 2012’s big winners are
romances, all but one ( The Lucky One , by Nicholas Sparks) of the
sexed-up genre now known as “mommy-porn.” There are plenty of shoot-’em-up
American novels, but they rarely make the bestseller lists, no more than Rage did when it was published.
     American movies have always been a violent medium —
remember James Cagney brandishing a gun atop a natural gas tank at the end of Public
Enemy and proclaiming, “Top of the world, Ma”? — but if you take a close
look at the dozen top-grossing films of 2012, you see an interesting thing:
only one ( Skyfall ) features gun violence. Three of the most popular were
animated cartoons, one is an R-rated comedy, and three ( The Avengers , The
Dark Knight Rises , and The Amazing Spider-Man ) are superhero films.
I think it’s important to note that Iron Man, Spider-Man, Batman, and others of their costumed ilk don’t carry guns; they use their
various exotic powers. When those fail, they ball up their good old
all-American fists. Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs
directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too
cowardly to fight like men.
    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