Blaming Hollywood.

One of the things we Europeans find incomprehensible about America is the number of people prepared to wander around shooting innocent victims. But that’s only half the story. What we also find incomprehensible is the sheer passion so many Americans express with regard to their right to bear arms. Such passion doesn’t exist in Europe because guns aren’t part of the culture. We don’t even think about them. I, for one, have never in all my life known anybody who owned anything more deadly than an air rifle.

I’ve often thought about this and think I might have come up with a theory. I wonder whether it might be Hollywood’s fault. It goes like this:

Europe had its own periods in history when social violence was common and people carried arms for self-defence. Christopher Marlowe, for example, the Elizabethan playwright was killed in a bar brawl in 1593. But by the time the movie industry got underway in the early twentieth century, European society was relatively peaceable and well structured. Social violence on a dangerous scale had become a matter of history.

Not so in America, at least in the Midwest, far west, and south-west where the anarchy prevalent in the pioneering days was still part of living memory. (Or so it seems to me. Fell free to correct me if I’m wrong.) And then along comes Hollywood and silver screens across the nation are awash with guns, gunfights, and the routine bearing of arms, either to enforce one person’s will or defend against another’s.

If I’m right, doesn’t it suggest that Hollywood’s preoccupation with the western kept the gun-carrying mentality central to American consciousness, at least in those parts of America more influenced by the pioneering spirit than the European sensibilities established in the ex-colonies of the east and north-east?

If that is the case, it seems to me that it’s the essential link which needs to be broken. I wonder how long it will take so that school kids don’t have to be taught to run in a zigzag pattern when the shooting starts.