Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [95]
Dr. Dietz told me he believes America’s news and entertainment media—its action movies, “reality” shows, news broadcasts, novels, and newspapers—play a far greater role in stimulating the country’s bloodlust than any other source, including underculture publishers like Paladin Press. “Nothing evil or disgusting known to man lacks a guidebook,” he told me. “But it’s not only Paladin producing them. Today Hollywood studios market more widely a more graphic version for the illiterate than Paladin would be capable of generating or selling. Whereas ten years ago someone wanting to know how to more effectively rob a bank or kill with poison or booby-trap a crack house would have to consult a more experienced offender or go to a library or bookstore, today they need merely turn on HBO. And so a lower intellectual grade of offender has been given access to what only those who could read or communicate had available in the past. That’s not Paladin’s doing. That’s Hollywood’s doing.”
Clearly, the role of movies and television in stimulating violence can never be quantified. Their impact, however, seems obvious. Consider how the phrase “Make my day” migrated from the movie Dirty Harry to car bumpers from coast to coast, even to a presidential speech, and, in slightly altered form, to the dialogue in a Disney “Duck Tales” cartoon. Recall too how sales of the Ingram submachine guns boomed after McQ, how Dirty Harry jolted sales of the Smith & Wesson Model 29. Add to this the American Psychological Association’s estimate that by the time a child finishes elementary school he will have watched eight thousand murders on television.
Early in 1993 I again visited the Frederick County gun show and, while loitering at a booth offering sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and submachine guns (including a MAC-10 for $595), listened in as a young boy peppered the dealer with questions. The image was pure Rockwell, but with a rather dark contemporary twist. The boy wore a baseball cap with the beak lifted high off his forehead. He had freckles and ruddy cheeks, and glasses that had slipped a bit down his nose. His jacket was new, and too big. Instead of trying out the stethoscope of some kindly Rockwellian doctor, he caressed the smooth metal finish of a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. He paused before a Barrett Firearms .50-caliber sniper rifle, which reared above the table on its bipod barrel rest. This was the gun Jim Moore had offered to show me in Las Vegas.
“Is this the same gun they used in the movie?” the boy asked the dealer.
“Right,” the dealer said. “The Navy SEALs.”
The boy touched the rifle. “He used this to shoot through a building,” the boy said with the kind of reverence once reserved for home-run baseballs.
“You shoot this at a building, it’ll take off a pretty good piece,” the dealer agreed.
The boy pointed at the powerful scope mounted on the rifle. “And he used this to see through the building.”
The dealer kept a straight face.
The power of the entertainment media in fostering the appeal of guns became especially clear to me one afternoon when I and my daughters visited a video store in hopes of renting Peter Pan. My two-and-a-half-year-old was immediately distracted by an almost life-size cardboard cutout of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in their Lethal Weapon roles, with Mel Gibson’s arm and his trademark Beretta extended into space. My daughter closed her hands around the Beretta, then pulled away, making her hands into the shape of a gun. She held them out before her in a position astonishingly like the isosceles combat stance used by police and their TV counterparts and, while imitating as best she could the sound of a gun, fired two pretend shots at her older sister. This was sibling rivalry, American style.
Our movies and TV shows do far more damage than simply boosting the appeal of weapons, however. They teach