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Moving Targets: Bowling for Columbine and American Gun Play

Americans, like everyone else in the world, know that theirs is a violent society. They are not in agreement about why it is or what to do about it or even whether to worry about it, but they know that violence is an American specialty. It is not just any old sort of violence that we specialize in, but gun violence. We shoot each other a lot. Nobody else is as productive of gun wounds and gun deaths. As if that fact were not disquieting enough, we must also deal with our global reputation as gun wielders. As a magnet for immigrants throughout its history, America has been most concerned with assimilating foreign cultures and subcultures. In the process, we have evolved a distinctive national culture of our own, one which does not duplicate any of the ones that contributed to it. The vitality of that culture is demonstrated by the continuing complaint of “natives” that the “newcomers” are undermining it. Although we are always building and changing our culture, the only one we seem to respect is the one we just outgrew. Whatever we think of ourselves and our distinctive ways of life, the rest of the world has had a strong impression of us for quite some time. The qualities identified as American are well publicized abroad, and they are not necessarily the ones we attribute to ourselves. Furthermore, we are often blissfully ignorant of that stereotype that others associate with us, for good or ill. There are two corollaries to this foreign conception of Americans. First, one of our ways of achieving sophistication and cosmopolitanism is to become aware of and then to adopt foreign attitudes to American culture. So we may flee from our native culture in pursuit of social status; what could be more American. Second, we make a good, even indispensable, income from marketing that stereotyped culture. Some forms of Americana are more valued by global consumers than others. In (stereo)typical American fashion, we are happy to emphasize that more popular side of ourselves in the interests of doing better business.