Word: guns
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Some images in recent films are both repellent and (the tricky part) exciting. Some song lyrics express a rage that's not easy to take as irony. And, yes, a movie or song or TV show may inspire some sick twist to earn satanic stardom with a gun. But most kids deserve the respect their parents wanted when they were kids: to be able to consume bits of pop culture and decide on their own whether it's poetry, entertainment or junk...
...massacre in Colorado did raise a serious issue, yet again: gun control. Newspapers all over the world published sanctimonious editorials about the "American gun culture." The National Rifle Association went on sensitivity alert; in a rare moment of self-effacement it canceled the festive public events and gun show planned around its annual meeting, but not the meeting itself, which by coincidence is scheduled for this week in Denver...
...anti-gun forces took some energy from public outrage over the shootings. California's assembly approved a bill designed to limit handgun sales. The gun lobby in Colorado had been expecting to get passage of three bills (to loosen restrictions on concealed-weapons permits, to ban local lawsuits against manufacturers and to pre-empt local ordinances on firearms). State legislators quickly withdrew two of them, and Governor Bill Owens promised to veto the third. Earlier in April, Missouri voters defeated a referendum to lift a constitutional ban on concealed weapons. So far this year, New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska have...
...witnessing the beginning of one of those tectonic shifts in our culture and morality: the terror haunting the gun industry is the precedent of tobacco. At some point in the last couple of generations, smoking became disreputable in American life--a sort of moral consensus formed. If juries were to start awarding damages to cities, or to individual gunshot victims, extracting millions from gun manufacturers, or at least forcing them to mount expensive defenses in hundreds of suits, then it is possible that the N.R.A. and other defenders of the gun might abandon their cold-dead-hand absolutism and begin...
...live on a farm and own four long guns. I learned to shoot when I was 10 years old, under the tutelage of the N.R.A. It was not a flawless education: when I was 13, I nearly blew a friend's head off, by accident, with his father's .38 revolver. (I was lucky enough to be permitted to learn a lesson the hard way; my friend was plain lucky.) I find that I sympathize with both the gun culture and the anti-gun culture. I do wish the gun culture were a lot more intelligent...