{"id":14,"date":"2006-11-13T17:00:31","date_gmt":"2006-11-13T05:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2012-07-27T13:25:02","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T01:25:02","slug":"mmm-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/mmm-guns\/","title":{"rendered":"Mmm. Guns."},"content":{"rendered":"

Show me a gun and I can reel off its specs without once squinting at the slide or housing. Hand it to me – and after I’ve ensured its safety is on and the chamber’s empty, its business end pointed at my foot<\/span> the ground the whole time – and I’ll list any number of films and tv shows it’s been used in.<\/p>\n

I like guns.<\/p>\n

The Goddess – who Knows These Things – could very probably trace my fascination with weapons of destruction to my Y-chromosome, my television addiction (one of my earliest memories are SWAT<\/em> and Starsky and Hutch<\/em>), and my all-too-male predilection for all and every thing phallic and destructive.<\/p>\n

She’s probably right.<\/p>\n

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend as I get older though. No longer is it funny for a character to wave a pistol around in blithe ignorance. Nowadays, I actually appreciate a denouement where the villain’s life isn’t taken with a bullet. And most disturbing of all, I find myself flinching at set-pieces which only a decade – even a half<\/em>-decade – ago I would have revelled in each round’s subsonic track through the air, each squib’s slo-mo explosion… a symphony of stylised, choreographed violence on flesh.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t Peckinpah’s blood-sodden Wild Bunch<\/em> or even Mann’s bullet-ridden Heat<\/em> that was the turning point for this action junkie. It was a 1986 telemovie: In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders<\/em>. It was a typical procedural based on a true story: a couple of guys get a taste for armed robbery, the local law enforcement begin tracking them, and the inevitable showdown ensues.<\/p>\n

It was the showdown that left me horrified – a real-time set-piece, faithful to the FBI reconstruction of the actual bloodbath. No whizz-bang cutting between the shooters. No slo-mo heroics with rousing music. Just people killing people. Very messily.<\/p>\n

I’ve listened to gun-nuts and veterans espouse their philosophies. I’ve shot some pistols at some very obliging pistol clubs. The Goddess is ‘why have guns at all’ while I’m ‘guns don’t kill people – people kill people’.<\/p>\n

I like guns. But only on screen and\/or under strict supervision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Show me a gun and I can reel off its specs without once squinting at the slide or housing. Hand it to me – and after I’ve ensured its safety is on and the chamber’s empty, its business end pointed at my foot the ground the whole time – and I’ll list any number of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Mmm. Guns.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[286,293,290,289,288,291,287,292],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptwriting","tag-guns","tag-heat","tag-in-the-line-of-duty","tag-starsky-hutch","tag-swat","tag-the-fbi-murders","tag-the-goddess","tag-wild-bunch"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}