I'm trying to think, where did all this gun business COME from? Because when I was young, nobody kept huge gun collections! Certainly there were no assault rifles. Three guns in a house would be a lot -- a pistol, a shotgun, maybe a .22 (my personal favorite).
You never saw this cult of the huge, fierce superguns like we have now.
I think it's the movies and the video games, competing with each other to push the line up, up, up!
Consider how many movies show a bare-walled room; the Hero pushes a button and the walls fly back and there are gazumpteen giant superguns all placed convenient for grabbing. Terminator 1 does that at the gun store; Terminator 2 has the mom storing guns; Tremors has the survivalist break out guns when the monsters are getting in and he delivers the classic line beloved by all gun-nuts: "Broke into the wrong damn rec room, didn't you!!" In Men in Black such a wall opens up and the Will Smith character wants one of the big giant superguns, sort of an assault rifle multiplied by 2, but he only gets a little strange pistol.
An armory with giant assault guns for grabbing and using is the norm in all these sort of movies.
Video games: I played Fable III which has some of these sort of highly peculiar big guns, but they aren't used much. I'm playing Dante's Inferno (GREAT game!) which doesn't do guns, just one melee weapon and magic.
But in honor of this public debate over assault rifles I've been looking at all the previews of Halo 3 and other such first-person shooter games, and it's an eye-opener. That's where the assault rifle craze is really coming from! All the characters do is shoot, shoot, shoot, and the more they can kill, the sooner they win even BIGGER assault rifles, three times normal size with lots of bells and whistles, strange stuff sticking out, very steroid.
The video game and movie industry has, IMO, seduced American men into wanting this kind of crazy over-developed guns and those with weak minds want to shoot them in real life, like James Holmes with his AR-15 at the Batman movie and his 100-shell magazine that jammed. He went armored like a Halo3 player, costumed up even to his hair.
This is where it has come from, the game and movie writers have got American men collecting big R/L collections of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines in an effort to bring the excitement of games and movies into real life!
This is a disaster; we'd be a lot better off as a country if they went in a different direction artistically. They are seducing the male population into violence, and leading them to collect the kind of roid rage guns they show on the games and movies. If writers had done that in the '50s, they'd have been put in jail! And in the '50s, people didn't collect these arms and go shooting children in schools. There's a connection.
You never saw this cult of the huge, fierce superguns like we have now.
I think it's the movies and the video games, competing with each other to push the line up, up, up!
Consider how many movies show a bare-walled room; the Hero pushes a button and the walls fly back and there are gazumpteen giant superguns all placed convenient for grabbing. Terminator 1 does that at the gun store; Terminator 2 has the mom storing guns; Tremors has the survivalist break out guns when the monsters are getting in and he delivers the classic line beloved by all gun-nuts: "Broke into the wrong damn rec room, didn't you!!" In Men in Black such a wall opens up and the Will Smith character wants one of the big giant superguns, sort of an assault rifle multiplied by 2, but he only gets a little strange pistol.
An armory with giant assault guns for grabbing and using is the norm in all these sort of movies.
Video games: I played Fable III which has some of these sort of highly peculiar big guns, but they aren't used much. I'm playing Dante's Inferno (GREAT game!) which doesn't do guns, just one melee weapon and magic.
But in honor of this public debate over assault rifles I've been looking at all the previews of Halo 3 and other such first-person shooter games, and it's an eye-opener. That's where the assault rifle craze is really coming from! All the characters do is shoot, shoot, shoot, and the more they can kill, the sooner they win even BIGGER assault rifles, three times normal size with lots of bells and whistles, strange stuff sticking out, very steroid.
The video game and movie industry has, IMO, seduced American men into wanting this kind of crazy over-developed guns and those with weak minds want to shoot them in real life, like James Holmes with his AR-15 at the Batman movie and his 100-shell magazine that jammed. He went armored like a Halo3 player, costumed up even to his hair.
This is where it has come from, the game and movie writers have got American men collecting big R/L collections of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines in an effort to bring the excitement of games and movies into real life!
This is a disaster; we'd be a lot better off as a country if they went in a different direction artistically. They are seducing the male population into violence, and leading them to collect the kind of roid rage guns they show on the games and movies. If writers had done that in the '50s, they'd have been put in jail! And in the '50s, people didn't collect these arms and go shooting children in schools. There's a connection.
