American Gun, Bowling for Columbine, and a Reflection on the Complexity of Problems

Warning: Discussion of gun control, war, and violence in this post.

I went to a screening held by the Philosophy department of a movie called American Gun a few weeks ago, and this past week my Comm Theory class watched Bowling for Columbine.  So my mind has lately been on gun control, and the role of the media when we talk about it, and I decided that I would write up a brief post about it.

To be honest, I think part of our issue with gun violence is in the highly militarized and, yes, violent nature of our culture.  In the US, I don't believe there has ever been a year -- just a year -- where we weren't involved in some kind of armed conflict with someone.  Now, I could be wrong, but even if I'm exaggerating, for most of our history -- and currently -- the state has placed much of its worth on its military might.


It makes sense, because we had to begin with violence in order to throw off British rule.  Of course we would place value on a "strong militia," especially when we were a young nation that could still easily be felled by a more powerful state.

But we've reached the point where we feel the need to be superdominant in order to feel at ease with our position in the world, and to do that, we feel we need to be militarily dominant.

And since that's coded into our culture, of course we'll be protective of our arms and our "right to bear" them.  It's also coded into our culture that we need to protect our own and that the government will never be good enough to do that for us -- which, for certain groups of people, is unfortunately the case.

(However, we very rarely see the people who lack the privileges of government protection advocating for arms; more often than not, it's the wealthy-to-middle-class white men who are the face of organizations like the NRA.  I was actually surprised by the presence in Bowling for Columbine of several women members of a state militia group, because the gun-owning people you usually hear squawking about the inefficiency and impossibility of gun control are almost without exception men.)

Overall, I think that there's no easy answer to the question of gun control, but I think we do need to consider compromises -- this is not one situation where one side is right and one side is wrong, because those do exist, but this is not one of them.