Guns

IV. Culture of Violence

I also don’t believe the NRA’s assertion — articulated by Mr. LaPierre each time there’s another mass murder by gun in a school or a shopping mall — that America’s so-called “culture of violence” plays a significant role in kid-on-kid school shootings. That this idea has gained even a shred of acceptance simply proves what George Orwell knew when he wrote 1984: if you say a thing often enough, it will be accepted as truth. Let me be frank: The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a 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 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.