Are guns the only culprit here? Isn violence endemic to American culture?
I’m sort of in the camp of Mario Cuomo; I’m more concerned about real guns than pictures of guns. American entertainment basically saturates the world, and the only difference between us and Canada or England or other industrial nations is that we have the means to carry out the fantasies as portrayed in film. The difference is not what’s being seen on the evening news or in mass-market entertainment; it’s the unique access we allow our citizens to a wide range of weapons that is unparalleled in the world. This aspect of the gun culture is protected by the absolute views of groups like the NRA and the fealty paid to the pro-gun movement by many of our political leaders. One of the striking things is that the NRA has become grass-roots troops for the conservative movement in America. If you look at the gun industry and you look at the NRA, they’re all facing the same problem: Their core is eroding. They’re getting older, they’re dying off. And there has been an effort — this is since t
