Fight Annoying Gun Imagery
By Michael Herring
Illustration by Phillip Shafer

If you are anybody, then you have most likely heard the opinions of the anti-television crowd. These are the people who tell you that watching television is bad for you and it "rots" your mind. They would like you, the viewer, to believe that television is almost as bad for you as frying yourself up for dinner.

And I agree with that suggestion almost entirely. Avoiding television is always good for allowing yourself some time to indulge in your alternate hobbies that may or may not involve envelope openers. But sometimes those activities get boring, and you need to see an increasingly hilarious episode of the Simpsons or whatever else. And if you've ever been bored enough to actually watch more than a half hour of TV in one sitting, you've most likely been subjected to lots of overplayed and annoying gun imagery.

One of the largest problems I see in television and the entire entertainment industry is the prevalence of this obnoxiously frequent gun imagery. How many times have you seen a movie or television show that includes the classic "I have a gun in your damn face" scene? Way too many, is what I say. Guns are becoming trite as hell and therefore, less scary. Now. To keep the violence and nerve-wracking intensity levels of many fine American programs, I offer this suggestion: Take all those sorry guns and replace them with more creative weapons. And I'm talking creative here, not just larger or more powerful. As if a tank would do, or some shit like that. Use your MIND.

Alright, now that you feel like using your mind, go ahead and imagine your favorite "I have a gun in your damn face" scene, and replace the sorry, predictable gun with something new and fresh as hell. Then you get things like the following: A crossbow, a weedwhacker, a high horsepower riding lawnmower, a cement truck, an oversized pencil sharpener, or an uprooted building being supported by a large crane, Take it back to the old days of cartoons and medieval warfare. That's right - The Middle Ages, when they had the creative weapons, like vats of oil, big assed catapults, and sticks with big fucking spiked spheres chained to them.

If the entertainment industry would make this one modification, it might actually become a halfway respectable entity.