Guns and Culture

Mass shootings should be a time of coming together. Instead, they are tearing us apart.

There is an episode of the TV series Arrow where a mass shooting takes place in the fictional Star City. In the season 5 episode “Spectre of the Gun,” Mayor Oliver Queen (who is also the comic book hero, the Green Arrow), is faced with the task of how to best respond. Within his team of superheroes, there is a debate between those who support the second amendment and those who don’t. The episode ends with Mayor Queen working a compromise with a pro-gun city councilperson to make such shootings less frequent.

The episode was kind of one of those “a very special episode” of decades past, but with a bit of a twist; instead of trying to hammer home a message, it was showing how people of differing viewpoints can come together to solve a problem.

I’m sharing this story because as we debate gun regulation in the wake of the horrific Parkland, Florida shootings, we are again having this argument about the role of guns in American society. And again, we see the same arguments on social media back and forth. In a fictional universe, good people on both sides of an issue come together to solve a problem. But in that universe, guns were not a cultural issue. But here in America, guns are not a policy issue. If it was, we would…