10 Movies That Honestly Depict the Horror of Gun Violence

In the gun debate, one often hears a similar argument: the movies make guns look unduly romantic and cool, transforming them into fetish objects to celebrated with mindless glee, contributing to a culture of acceptability and the naturalization of violence. Whether representation, even if flattering or romanticized, actively influences the behaviour of an impressionable audience is hard to say, but in any case it seems obvious that the cinema—and the American cinema in particular—has a fascination with gun violence so extreme and unrelenting that it borders on irresponsible. The problem isn't so much that movies explicitly valorize guns as it is that they do nothing to suppress their appeal. In the immediate wake of the Senate's most recent failure to pass more comprehensive gun legislation, we've compiled ten films that make a point of doing the opposite.