Guns and the City: Guns in American Books and Movies The gun has long been a symbol

of power and masculinity in America. The figure of the gun-toting frontiersman in popular literature was created by James Fenimore Cooper in his adventure tales The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1840). By the late 1800s, cowboy and Wild West imagery had become part of the collective imagination. A female cowboy, Calamity Jane (1852-1903) featured in Edward Wheelers Deadwood Dick dime novels from 1877. The first American female superstar, Annie Oakley (1860-1926) was a sharpshooter from Ohio who toured the country from 1885 as a performer in Buffalo Bills Wild West Show. (The musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946) was a fictional account of her life.) The archetypal cowboy hero was established largely by Theodore Roosevelts The Winning of the West (1889-95), a history of the early frontier, and by Owen Wister in stories and novels, most notably The Virginian (1902). The image of the swaggering, gunslinging cowboy was also popularized by early cinema, notably through such classics as The Great Train Robbery (1903) and A California Hold Up (1906), the most commercially successful film of the prenickelodeon era. Since the 1930s, gangster films have flaunted the image of the tough, wily, gun-wielding urban lawbreaker. To some extent this image was replaced in and after World War II by the patriotic combat film that emphasized group efforts and individual sacrifice for a larger cause. These movies often featured groups of men from diverse backgrounds who were thrown together, tested on the battlefield and molded into a dedicated fighting unit. The use of guns continued to feature in late 20th century action films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), Dirty Harry (1979) and Robocop (1987). In the 1970s, films like Taxi Driver (1976) and Apocalypse Now (1979) portrayed men apparently sent mad by the Vietnam war, while other movies such as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter (both 1978) told of fictitious veterans supposedly in need of rehabilitation after their Vietnam experiences. The negative role of the gun in fictionalized modern urban violence has been explored in such films as Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Menace to Society (1993).
Juice (1992) is a movie that opened to shootouts, knifings and fights in a half-dozen cities. The danger was sufficiently great that Paramount Pictures underwrote extra security for movie houses where Juice was shown. In the language of urban America, the word "juice" refers to influence that is often won through violence or intimidation. The guy with the most juice is the guy who is most likely to have gunned down a rival in the street. There were similar outbreaks at the openings of John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood and Mario Van Peebles's New Jack City, two other films that dealt with urban violence by young black men. Movies about raw urban violence are a necessary part of the American experience. But films like Juice were clearly packaged to appeal to the most violent segments of the audience. Hollywood may need to change those marketing tactics before the violence makes showings impossible. True, most of the violence happened outside the theaters and much of it was probably carried out by people who never saw Juice. They did not have to; the ad campaign was plenty. The poster shows four young black men above a caption that reads: "Juice. Power. Respect. How far will you go to get it?" The question's implicit answer is, as far as necessary.

The movie centers on four young men from Harlem who skip school, shoplift, then stage a robbery in which one of them murders a storekeeper. He also kills a friend from the robbery crew, and tries to murder the remaining two. The director, Ernest Dickerson, intended to condemn senseless killing. He failed. Juice arguably compounds a problem that was evident in its predecessors: it is so caught up in the culture of violence that it treats the moral consequences as an afterthought. Similar things could be said of other violent films, like Terminator 2 or the latest instalment of Nightmare on Elm Street. But those unrealistic films do not attract gun-toting moviegoers. The difference is that Juice and its cousins dwell on specific forms of violence that their audiences know well and even participate in. That link calls for restraint, especially from marketing strategists. Films should embrace the language and music of the streets. But Hollywood needs to take special care not to embrace the violence as well. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of exposure to vicarious violence through movies. The CD market in terms of sales and viewings is many times bigger. On cduniverse.com alone there are no fewer than 226 pages of urban violence cds listed, 23 to the page a total of 5198. Since 2000 the 17 most popular urban violence movies according to this website have been: Three 6 Mafia (2001), Harlem Blues (2002), Paid in Full (2002), State Property (2002), Leprachaun Back to tha Hood (2003), Two Sides of Life (2004), Chicago Boricua (2005), Ghetto Fights 2 (2005), Hood 2 Hood (2005), Life of Rayful Edmund (2005), Live from Da Gutter (2005), Reading Room (2005), Belly 2 (2006), Hood Life 2 (2006), Envy (2008), Ghetto Fights 4 (2008), and The Shield (2009). Adam Simons on February 14, 2013, in the online Urban Times opined that violence in film was not a bad thing http://urbantimes.co/. Simons admits that it would be nave to believe that violent films did not have some minor role in the encouragement of certain sick individuals to perform abhorrent acts. However, the fact that they are sick is the main issue, he argues. These people are mentally ill, evil, or unstable and would probably have gone on a deranged shooting spree without the previous use of video games and films. The problem is not the material; it is the people who interpret it in the wrong manner that are the issue.we blame film sometimes because its right there in our face. however, the influences usually dissipates quickly. The fact is mass killings by individuals were happening way before films were invented and the unfortunate situation in America now is that the ability to purchase weapons capable of such evil feats is still a disturbingly easy process. Urban violence and race The fact that some urban violence movies are set in African American ghettoes should not mislead us into racial stereotyping about the problem of real-life violence. Both the Columbine and Newtown school shootings, for example, took place in affluent neighborhoods and the suspects were from affluent homes. The issue is examined in a long article by Henry A. Giroux, Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyperreal Violence: Pulp Fiction and Other Visual Tragedies, http://www.henryagiroux.com/, Social Identities 1:2 (1995), pp. 333-354. Giroux states: Cinema and the Culture of Violence American cinema has increasingly provided a site of convergence for depicting both the inner city reality of black-on-black youth violence and for promoting a renewed acceptability and/or tolerance of straightforward racist doctrine. Recent films focusing on black urban violence such as Boys N the Hood (1991), Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993), Sugar Hill (1994), and Fresh (1994) have attracted national media coverage because they do not simply represent contemporary urban realities but also reinforce the popular perception that everyday black urban life and violent crime

mutually define each other. Cinema appears to be providing a new language and aesthetic in which the city becomes the central site for social disorder and violence, and black youth in particular, become agents of crime, pathology, and moral decay.[Although] young black males constituted 17.7 per cent of all homicide victimsthey made up only 1.3 per cent of the US population. [Moreover] black men over age 24 were victims of homicide at a rate of 65.7 per 100,00, compared with 7.8 per 100,00 for white men." Toward a Cultural Policy of Violence in Films Films occupy an important public space in the culture of America. As commonplace as this might sound, it should not detract from the importance of recognizing that cinema is a teaching machine. That is, its representations of violence do not merely reflect reality, as many Hollywood producers claim. On the contrary, cinema carries with it a language of ethics and a pedagogy. Producers and directors constantly make normative distinctions about issues regarding how to develop characters and narratives, whether to use glossy, color saturated aesthetics, include complex representations of generally marginalized groups, or make violence subordinate to the integrity of the plot.providing a certain kind of language for conveying and understanding violence. At the same time, cinema functions in a broader pedagogical sense in that it is consistently making a claim to particular memories, histories, ways of life, identities, and values that always presupposes some notion of difference, community, and the future. Given that films both reflect and shape public culture, they cannot be defined exclusively through a notion of artistic freedom and autonomy that removes them from any form of critical accountability given the important role they play in shaping public life. This is not to suggest that public sphere of cinema should be subject to ruthless censorship, but at the same time it cannot it be regarded as a simple form of entertainment. Cinematic violence, whether it be ritualistic or hyperreal, offers viewers brutal and grotesque images that serve to pollute and undermine how children and adults care, relate, and respond to others. At stake here is not whether cinematic violence directly causes crime. In a world demeaned by pointless violence, the question that must be raised concerns what responsibilities filmmakers, other cultural workers, and their respective publics have in developing a cultural policy that addresses the limits and responsibilities of the use of violence in cinema. Such a policy must address how the mass media and cinematic public sphere can be held responsible for educating children and others about how to discriminate among different forms of violence, how to prevent it in real life when necessary, and how to engage its root social causes in the larger social and cultural landscape. Violence is not merely a function of power, Giroux continues, it is also deeply related to how forms of self and social agency are produced within a variety of public spheres.Linking cultural policy to the ethical responsibilities of a cinematic public sphere also raises fundamental questions about the democratization of culture. This is a question regarding ownership, power, and control and points to the issue of who has access to the means of cultural representation and who does not, and what the possibilities for democracy are when an enormous amount of inequality structures media culture. In the coming new information age, it is imperative that various cultural workers and educators raise important questions about the what kind of teacher we want cinema to be, with special concern for how the representation of violence works to pose a threat not only to our national health but to our potential for ever becoming a true participatory democracy. To simply blame filmmakers and television executives for causing violence in the United States shifts critical attention away from the poisonous roots of violence at the heart of social and economic life in America. Blaming the media also absolves educators, community activists, politicians, and other cultural

workers from assuming roles as critical citizens who need to address the complex relationships between the violence we absorb through the media and the reality of violence we experience in everyday life. Violence is not simply emanating from the movie theaters of America. Rooted in everyday institutional structures and social relations, violence has become a toxic glue that bonds Americans together while simultaneously preventing them from expanding and building a multiracial and multicultural democracy. Once the brutality of representational violence is understood as a threat to democracy itself, it might become possible to address it politically and pedagogically as we would other issues concerning our national identity, public health, and social consciousness. (my paragraphing) An international perspective Finally, there is a helpful international perspective. The report Urban Violence and Humanitarian Challenges (prompted by the Arab Spring and ongoing urban violence in the Middle East) derives from a colloquium on the theme of urban violence and humanitarian challenges organised jointly by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the European Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) that took place on 19 January 2012 in Brussels. In it the authors note that the laws of demography, statistics and geography are all converging towards cities as the places where political, economic, religious and ethnic rivalries are played out. Experience also shows that urban environments are prone to trigger excessive use of force. The report says that there are phases in addressing urban violence: crowd control, war on crime, pacification, socio-economic policies, and emergency humanitarian interventions. This requires the use of a constantly changing policy mix of humanitarian, security and socioeconomic tools and approaches. In other words, there are many tools in the tool box to fix urban violence, gun violence in particular, and a number of approaches need to be tried together if results are to flow. Idealistically we may recall that the very word city is linked to civilization. It is from urban communities that the great majority of human progress has been made. As the Bible and St Augustine teach: the story of Man begins in a Garden but ends in a City, the City of God. The call to build peaceful cities is thus a call to renew civilization itself.