The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution goes: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The topic of Gun Control always circles the drain of Election Years, before whirling down the drain, seemingly left to atrophy, despite however many school shootings there are every year. It doesn’t matter to the people who support guns. School shootings. Not one of their interests. Doesn’t fit their narrative. Dead children are hard to defend.
Because what happens when the Civil War breaks out and we must defend ourselves from our government? Are we keeping them in check? When we fire upon a political figure, is this our act of resistance against the government or is this in fact what valorizes the target? Do guns not always create exactly the opposite result that the people who advocate for them say they will?
I’ve lost a few people to guns. Which doesn’t seem like an astronomical amount. A few good people. But each loss was avoidable. Just take the guns away and they would still be here. So what cold comfort does it provide that they might save someone else’s life? As a form of necessity to protect from other people, because they too have guns. This violent circle swirls around the American discourse, election cycle after election cycle, and nothing formidble is ever really done.
When we look inside the culture of guns we see many different things. From My Cold Dead Hands is the social media of guns in aggregate. A collection of loosely linked YouTube videos showing errant stupidity around gun safety, questionable moral arguments for gun ownership, and some really lovely footage of shooting.
So, the documentary fairly spans the whole spectrum. This is a fair collection of what kind of video footage is being created around gun culture. Folks shooting themselves and others. Folks teaching people about guns as though they are the leader of a fascist state. Folks making cool musical montages of the very aesthetic and mechanical sounds that firing a gun makes.
It doesn’t all quite hold together. There’s a loose connective tissue, a couple of guys sitting at a table and discussing several points about why guns are owned. And for each point, we get a spectrum of YouTube videos that speak for themselves. It’s entertaining, for better and worse, and we cannot turn away, as our love-in of weapons is so immensely overstated so as to make Americans look like cartoons. How could we turn away? Fun as a summary but as someone without very much interest in the topic, I’ve seen some of this already, so if you’re actually interested, you’ve probably seen it all on the internet anyway, but here it is, compiled in a nice, neat, diverting package.
It’s perfectly fine, but the topic is too charged and too important to let these clips only speak for themselves. We need some perspective or reason why the collage fits together and tells a story besides how sensational gun culture in America has become.