Guns are a huge business in America. I mean huge. We are talking $70.52 billion dollars huge. That is a lot of green. The American film industry is worth $42.5 Billion, just to give you a comparison. And here’s an interesting note: the gaming industry, which a lot of Republican lawmakers blame for gun violence is worth $145 Billion. If I had to take a guess, I’d say Ted Cruz and the lot of them would roll over really fast from their criticism if they could figure out how to get a penny of the gaming dollar.
So we didn’t get here overnight and yes, we are dealing with a financial and cultural Goliath in the gun lobby, made virtually impossible to slay because one of the two major political parties is owned by said Goliath.
And that has led us to this cultural reality in America, brilliantly distilled and encapsulated by Don Winslow Films.
No more empty promises.
No more classrooms full of dead children.
Watch, quote retweet & retweet #RepublicanSchoolDay pic.twitter.com/OfGO7IdKqo
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) June 3, 2022
We ask this all the time, but we never get an answer. How many more of these do we have to endure as a nation before we cry Uncle and make it stop? You heard Mitch McConnell intone at the end, forget about it, in essence, nothing is going to change.
We have a situation here which is an illustration of the quandary between the irresistible force and the immoveable object. Something’s got to give, like the song says. We can’t continue to live this way. No society can long endure if parents and children wake up in the morning, say goodbye as they head for work and school, respectively, and wonder if they’re going to see each other again at the end of the day. If you wrote a dystopian sci fi story, where a culture like this existed and life was a game of Russian roulette from day to day, nobody would believe you. Yet this is rapidly becoming the new normal in America, more than one shooting a day.
This is not normal, this is anti-life. The fact that this policy comes from the pro-life party is so stunningly hypocritical that it boggles the mind to even contemplate.
A couple of thoughts:
1–With regards to the gaming industry, several of the military-themed games and the “first-person shooter” games have actually licensed the weapons used in the games from gun manufacturers. So, some of that $70 billion gun industry value derives from the $145 billion gaming industry value.
2–If the GOP had their way, we wouldn’t have to worry about school shootings since public schools would be a thing of the past. The GOP has tried its hardest to do away with the idea of “public education” for the last 50 years.
Thank you for pointing out the relationship between the gaming industry and the gun industry. That is news to me. When you say the gamers have “licensed the weapons” from the manufacturers, you mean they’ve licensed the right to use the images of the weapons on their games? So, for example, the Big Bear game (just to make something up) uses AR-15s but the Little Deer game uses AK-47s? And you need to have a license to use the images of those weapons in the online games? This is getting far far stranger than I thought.