As the memories of my childhood swirl through my head, I see myself standing there in boots, jeans, chaps and an oversized hat, spinning my chrome revolvers around my trigger fingers with confidence and grace, and then popping-off a couple of well-aimed shots. As a final embellishment, I pretend to blow the smoke from each muzzle, then place my Colt-45s back in their holsters.
This was the life I knew. I learned everything really important from the golden screen. When Mother asked me to go out and get the mail, I swaggered confidently. Neighbors surely must have noticed—I was tall and slim, a quick-drawing, steady-handed force to be reckoned with.
The macho qualities of the disappearing Old West became an integral part of my generation. Attitudes, as basic as the value of life, were thrown aside so that Western movies could bring in the audiences and the dough.
Of course, people need heroes they can relate to, and the cowboy movies surely provided them. But there was another consequence: movie aficionados became desensitized to wholesale death. Long before generations of mothers had the wisdom to forbid their kids to play shoot-em-up games with the neighbors, the movie industry had created a frightening crisis, particularly for young, formative minds.
Today, I am sorry. I'm sorry because the movie industry, motivated only by profits, cultivated an enduring curse on our country. America stands out in our world as a culture of guns and violence, and there are few weeks that pass without the notice of far too much killing and mayhem. A large percentage of tragic, daily news has one single, common factor.
Guns.
The forties, fifties and sixties were a unique time for the movie industry. There was no question about it: The cowboy was king. And it wasn't just the kids that ate it up, and it went far beyond a cult culture. Most Americans—as well as their compadres around the globe—worshiped the endless stream of cowboy movies and the stars that drove the then-insane profits at the theaters.
Names like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston and Steve McQueen were some of the biggest stars. They all rode and shot their way through endless hours of riveting flicks, taking on the Western persona as their personal identities, and presenting a fictional, imaginary world, wherein only simple truth persisted. It was a period of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, and movie fans became accustomed to watching the bad guys get their just dues. The morality was simple—only the good deserve to live.
Today, we still live in the wake of the classic "Westerns," but most of us have realized that the justice, represented in those shoot-em-up classics, was a really bad example for the young and impressionable minds of that era. Hollywood portrayed the Native American as a murderous pest in westward expansion. And the words still ring in my ears: "The only good injun is a dead injun." People my age were repeating those words, and we only felt compassion if the bullets hit one of the good guys. Outlaws and Indians were always bad.
The movie set could be littered with bodies and blood. Death was everywhere, but if it wasn't James Stewart, the Lone Ranger, or Hopalong Cassidy, that was A-OK. (Incidentally, with a name like "Hopalong," he'd certainly have qualified for a handicapped hitching post at the supermarket.)
As a world, we learned to watch men—and a few women, like Barbara Stanwick—die. It was usually rather sanitary, and the amount of horror and gore were always minimized in favor of tidy bullet holes and men instantly crumbling to the dirt. The world—but especially in American—became insensitive and callous to the bad guys dying, because that was undeniably right, and they deserved it.
Now, in a world where people have been carefully labeled with signs—good guys and bad guys—the discriminate use of guns to clean up society might seem fair to underdeveloped minds. But, in a modern world, most of us have come to appreciate that no one is 100 percent good or 100 percent bad. Besides, the frontier "justice" of the 1800s and early 20th century no longer seems justifiable to people who believe in the essential ideals of our country, and especially the rights of the accused to a fair and balanced judicial system.
Our current gun mentality has been further reinforced by the ever-more-violent video and computer games, that lavish our children with expanded magazine capacities and highly efficient weapons of—what can only be described as—mass destruction. If the movie studios of yesteryear could see today's horror of almost-daily mass shootings, would they have still cultivated the Western films and the Heston-istic dedication to guns as an integral part of American life? My guess is that yesterday's film industry made money its only goal.
John Wayne may be long gone, but the gun has not disappeared from American culture. The U.S. stands out as an anomaly in a world where guns tend to be more tightly controlled. Sadly, today's Americans are loaded-down—and loaded-up—with the legacy of the six-gun, and the mind-set of settling disputes with bullets continues today.
Somehow, our nation must take a bold step in creating gun laws that help reverse the attitudes of the past. It's high-time to deal with easy access to guns and another generation that thinks killing's OK.
The author is a retired businessman, novelist, columnist, and former Vietnam-era Army assistant public information officer. He lives in Riverton, Utah with his wife, Carol, and the beloved ashes of their mongrel dog.
