for an hour and see how many square jawed super hunks are popping off guns to save the day.
I don't live with a television in my home, but I am house sitting this weekend. After combing through DU, reading post after post, ingesting all the various responses to the tragedy and the various arguments for/against more/less gun control, I flipped on the TV for a mental break, and there in stunning clarity is an appliance that delivers a steady stream of gun violence, glorification, and implied all-in-one problem solving. It is completely sickening. Every day, I wake up and throw open my door to sunshine, birds chirping, and friendly neighbors. The world is not a place of high stakes espionage and murder, but you would certainly think so by watching. I'm not saying television/movies/etc. are responsible for this tragedy, but I couldn't help but notice (after not watching for a few weeks) how PERVASIVE gun violence is in any given hour on any given day. I want to propose a grand experiment whereby a handful of people pledge to record, for one hour, a certain number of television channels in prime time. They would then go through with a click counter and watch each hour from each channel and log each time a gun is fired, brandished, or otherwise presented. If enough people could do this, we would have a rough metric for how many times each evening gun violence is presented, and I imagine the numbers would be astounding.
I am a mid-thirties, southern white male and though I learned how to use rifles and pistols in my youth through responsible parenting and hunter's safety course, I have ABSOLUTELY no need for a weapon other than a large stick and I refuse to live each day of my life in fear of some imagined threat that is bolstered by media saturation or fear of the "other". But then again, I went and got a fancy, liberal college edjumacation.
I have no gun, and I am not afraid.
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