The Difference Between Real Life Gun-Violence and Screen Gun-Violence

Anywhere you go on planet Earth, from the wars of sub-Saharan Africa, to the streets of the Baltimore inner-city, movies set the template for violence in young minds. This is not to say that movies cause or inspire young people to be violent, but that they influence how they are violent. For instance Al Pacino’s line in Scarface: “say hello to my little friend.” that scene where he opens fire with an AR-15, that set the style for a whole generation of would-be gangsters who identified with the character.

People when they first hold a gun, either a real gun, or a realistic toy-gun, usually revert to the last “cool” movie they saw with a movie-star holding one. They pose with it, like an action hero. Now, elsewhere in life we know that movies and reality are two different things. We know that the drama in most households is too complex to be captured in a screenplay, and too boring to be worth the effort, we know that there are very few genuine happy endings anywhere, your girlfriend does not look like Kate Hudson, and that when you are good and work hard you are not always (or even usually) rewarded for it. Real-life when held in comparison to your favorite films feels bland and hopeless, which is, of course, why we like movies. With gun-play, however, it is a different story. People still believe that there is something glamorous about it. This is because most people have never seen real gun-violence up close.

Even the TV news or footage of real life firefights are useless when it comes to providing an accurate depiction of the danger involved. People watch TV for visual stimulation and bullets are invisible. In a gunfight the air is filled with little metal chunks that can take your life, and that you cannot detect unless you or something in your vicinity gets hit. You can’t really get something like that across to people who expect to seeeverything. Even a movie like Saving Private Ryan (the Normandy-landing sequence), which provides you with the claustrophobic horror of death, whizzing by you, of very present, almost tangible peril, does not really provide you with a personal sense of that danger, because you are separated from it. That’s not you on Omaha beach. The difference here is you. That lack of actual involvement, combined with the relative rarity of them in real life, gives a distorted perception of them.

The guy posing with the gun does it because he has a false idea about the responsibilities of gun-ownership, or, in some cases, to impress you with how much of a tough-guy he is. He is pretending to be the guy in the movies for your benefit, not because he genuinely believes in it.

The person holding the gun in a film has power, and that kind of power lends itself to drama. They are loud and potentially fatal thereby providing and excellent narrative device, a prop for screen-stories, a way to jack up the tension and provide a loud, instant release for the audience. But that drama is for the screen, in real life with a genuinely dangerous firearm, you don’t have suspense, you have fear, or you should.