What the F is Going On!?! Part Ten: Guns.

I have had this post on my list to write for way too long, and there has been a consistent stream of shooting events that occur that make it timely. Whether it was the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, the killing of Charlie Kirk, the ICE killings in Minneapolis, a school shooting in British Columbia, the attempted shooting at the Correspondents Dinner, the family annihilation shooting in Louisiana that barely made the news, or the mass shooting at a Mosque in San Diego perpetrated by two young men. None of these shootings resulted in even a whisper on policy regarding guns. In fact, blame was put onto discourse by the Left, trans people, the Secret Service, or the lack of a White House Ballroom. Alex Pretti’s killing was blamed on him bringing a gun to a protest, despite legally having it, not handling it, and having been disarmed of it. This was a shocking act of mental gymnastics from the party that organizes Second Amendment marches where guns are encouraged, Donald Trump said on January 6th to allow people to his speech to go around magnetometers so that they could bring guns, and celebrated Kyle Rittenhouse, and Mark and Patricia McCluskey who all brandished firearms at protest, Rittenhouse’s incident resulted in the deaths of two protestors. 

The only gun policy instance that even made a blip in the news was a DOJ attorney that was fired because she was told to review Mel Gibson’s status where he had lost his right to own a gun because of a domestic violence conviction in 2011 and refused to reinstate his firearm rights. She felt he had not established that he would be safe to own a firearm within the standard of the law. 

In the US we have had a front and center discussion on the Second Amendment, mass shootings and the historic role of guns in our country going back to the ‘90’s, starting with “going postal” workplace shootings, escalating to worse and worse school shootings, and more and more common shootings at almost any venue in day to day life. One of the most visceral movies to depict a mass schooling was the fictionalized school shooting in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003). This is not a historical product, but a fictionalized retelling of the Columbine shooting using fictional characters played by local high school students from the area in Washington State where it was shot. Elephant puts human face on troubled boys who seem united in their violent scheme, and we see that they are living parallel disturbing experiences. We also see victims and survivors as individual personalities with different perspectives of a horrifying day. Elephant makes gun violence a real life event, truly terrifying, far from the action movie romanticism of guns. 

Columbine might have been the first national event where gun rights groups put out a united front that The United States has a long history and tradition of the right to bear arms that stemmed from the Second Amendment and exhibited through the identity of the Wild West. Westerns and the Wild West stories have often been told by conservative writers and filmmakers creating a mythology of rugged individualism and a lack of regulations. Two of the great films to depict the shootout at the O.K. Corral are from John Ford, a famously Republican director and Kurt Russell, a famously libertarian actor. My Darling Clementine (1946) and Tombstone (1993) are two of the great westerns, the former being one of the classic westerns of the 1940’s (a favorite of mine) and Tombstone being the great action western of the end of the 20th Century. The interesting thing is that this story could be told from the perspective of Wyatt Earp and his group of deputized law enforcement, the victors in the gun battle, or the cowboys who could be seen as victims of an out-of-control situation. Both films found the cowboys to be villainous, but the interesting aspect of the conflict is that it is centered on more laws coming to the town of Tombstone, greater enforcement, and restrictions on bringing firearms into town. Perhaps the greatest mythology building incident of the Wild West was not about freedom from regulation, but of the necessity for Government to have regulations to preserve order and give opportunity for a remote town to modernize. 

While there may be the mantra that gun violence is a necessity for liberty that has a historical footprint on our culture, this is a more recent frame of mind that stems from a reaction from the gun industry fearing a loss of business at the sight of children fleeing their school live on TV during a massacre. Gun rights haven’t been that pivotal of an issue from prominent conservatives until recent history. It really hasn’t been worth it to cling to aversions to regulations so that we can relive Elephant over and over again in all parts of our society on a fairly regular basis.

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What the F is Going On