Some more musings on the explosion in mass killings using guns in America, the latest the nearly thirty people, 20 of them children 5 – 10 years old, in Connecticut.
I no longer watch much television at all.
One of the reasons is I am just bone weary of not being able to find anything to watch but cop or swat or NCIS or FBI behavioral analysis fictionalized shows, all of which portray, sometimes in close up and graphic detail, the shooting, stabbing, torture, and maiming of victims by serial killers or raging psychopaths.
That is what our popular culture has reduced itself to.
And for the past 10 – 15 years, with the emergence of computerized CGI, it has become only worse in the movies. I watch hardly anything coming out of Hollywood anymore. All the films have become non-stop choreographed CGI generated violence of a magnitude that completely surpasses the potential for human experience in real life. Yet the “heros” usually emerge without a concussion or scratch, while the world around them has been reduced to rubble.
What disgusts me the most is the accuracy with which the characters, the good guys and the bad, are able to shot and kill others with just one shot. Clearly the people who write this crap have never fired a handgun in their life, and have no idea just how incredibly difficult it is to hit the center of a target if it is any further than about ten feet from you.
And there is one simple formula that thematically and for plot defines popular American entertainment: All problems will result in crises that result in violence, and all solutions involve violence, 95% of the time with a gun, against the victims and finally against the perpetrator of the violence.
It is the only solution to problems we teach in our culture.
This is why I upset people, because I do not believe in a total ban on guns, just on anything for private citizens beyond hand guns and rifles and shotguns for self defense and hunting. And no, a Bushmaster semi-automatic .223 assault rifle it NOT an appropriate gun to be in the home for home defense. A shotgun is. A handgun is.
And that is because I understand the simple truth that we as a culture have literally driven ourselves into this psychopathic corner mentally, where we fantasize life as non-stop violent threats, and looming cultural apocalypses spun out of fevered and diseased imaginations, and see the only solution as violent acts. We have poisoned our national psyche. How can we expect anything less than the horror we are reaping?
One other points about the fantasized violence in our media which we push on our culture as reality:
What disgusts me the most is the accuracy with which the characters, the good guys and the bad, are able to shot and kill others with just one shot.
Clearly the people who write this crap have never fired a handgun in their life, and have no idea just how incredibly difficult it is to hit the center of a target if it is any further than about ten feet from you.
This is especially true the larger the caliber of the gun, or the shorter the barrel of the gun.
I watched a Jean Reno French film the other night, “Wasabi”, which was entertaining, but end to end filled with him drilling the bad guys with a .45 Magnum that looked like it had a six inch or longer barrel, and hitting all the moving bad guys dead center at angled distance, while both parties were moving, and distances of 40 – 50 feet.
Yeah. Right.
Like so much else in our popular culture and psyche, we live in an envelope of denial regarding reality, be it climate change, religion, the corruption of our political culture, the massive shift in income inequality, science in general, ongoing racism, sexism, and agism. You name it.
The same applies to our refusal to address the underlying causes of violence in our society.
And if we never address those, it really will not matter what level or sort of gun control we institute.
