I've already repeatedly said I wing this impromptu, so naturally, being somewhat finicky, I have to add what I forgot. In the case of the famous 19th-century American gun makers' list, I forgot the Philadelphian, Deringer, who had an extra r added to his name for inventing the miniature gun so easily concealed in boot tops and garters and cleavages. I was also startled to read "and the Concord Gun Manufactory, where you could get everything from fowling pieces to six-barreled pistols"--this is in 1840--another testament to New England's place in gun history, in Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006), p. 15 (which sets some sort of title record). And it was Emerson's famous line in "Concord Hymn" about the neighborhood colonials firing "the shot heard round the world."
By mere coincidence, I was watching The Rundown again for the ? time, wherein Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) repeatedly protests he doesn't like guns, and caught Christopher Walken sneering, "Never met an American who didn't like guns," proving my cultural point. Later, after Seann William Scott asks him, "What's your problem with guns?" The Rock replies, "Let's just say they take me to a place I don't wanna go."
I don't know where we got the phrase, but in my childhood we called westerns significantly shoot-'em-up-bangs. We did, we really did. Of course, the very first western was Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) for Edison, based upon an actual 1900 event when Butch Cassidy's gang robbed a Union Pacific train near Table Rock, Wyoming. Only 12 minutes long, setting several precedents, the film ends shockingly when one of the bandits turns and fires point-blank at the audience. I saw it in one of the best classes I ever had, on Silent Cinema, starting my aborted doctorate at Bowling Green. And it still shocks. As does one of the most recent westerns, No Country for Old Men. Cormac McCarthy's superbly written novel was so violent when I read it upon its publication, it left me stunned enough to forego seeing the film for now, said to follow the book closely.
Besides the three international records for the U.S.--us--I mentioned, I should've added that the rest of the world is still highly conscious that the U.S.--us--created nuclear power and the first atomic bombs and is the only nation ever using them in warfare, twice, which we also conveniently ignore.
Finally, the new issue of The Week (21 December, p. 19) deals with the Omaha shootings as a media frenzy, that the media should somehow not give celebrity to killers after just that: "Now I'll be famous." Uh-huh. I'd already decided that the following zoo photo served well metaphorically for the W-H's effort to maintain some professional dignity among the TV feeding frenzy.
Perhaps all those koi should be piranha?
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