My Years With Guns - HBO Documentary Gun Fight

[RamboLiberal]

A crime novelist I know once claimed that through the issue of guns you could understand the whole history of the United States. After nearly three years producing the feature documentary Gun Fight with Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple (to be broadcast on HBO in mid-April), I certainly do see guns as much more than steel and caliber. The gun “issue” is woven with the strands of American history. It is also made from politics, culture, identity, passion, power, and, of course, fear.

It was daunting to begin such a project with the mandate that we make a documentary film “about guns.” It is like, as my novelist friend inferred, making a film as vast and complicated as our great and troubled country. And that is, essentially, what we did.

We spent time with hardcore gun activists of all stripes, including many who work tirelessly to protect what they view as their most important right. We interviewed the heads of gun companies and fired weapons with police chiefs in the middle of nowhere. We followed a young man who was shot four times in his French class at Virginia Tech as he turned his horrid experience into something positive. In a Sacramento emergency room, I watched a man screaming in pain as he was rushed into to the Trauma Unit, bones shattered from a bullet. We talked to a paralyzed teenager, a .22 caliber round lodged in his spine, and travelled many days with an individual who was once a leading lobbyist for the NRA. And we spent time with young people in inner city Philadelphia who get sucked into the vortex of gun violence.

Certain truths come out of these experiences, the kind that anyone who even superficially follows the politics of guns, or American politics, knows: the NRA is supremely powerful, intimidates politicians, and simplifies the issue to its advantage; guns and gun rights approximate with the Red State/Blue State divide; and populations in inner cities and those in rural settings often have stereotypes about each other—and different urban populations also hold stereotypes of each other. Guns are a fundamental element of American Life, be it in our popular media culture or in our everyday reality.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/03/express/my-years-with-guns

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/gun-fight/index.html