Kirk Hamilton wrote once that living as an American was to live, constantly, in the fugue of gun induced trauma. He also wrote that playing Videogames meant dealing with this trauma daily. We’ll shoot each other for fun, for sport. Sometimes we’ll drive with the top down through the streets of an imaginary city just to shoot someone. Today – while this article is on a computer screen somewhere, a protestor will be shot. I don’t like to discriminate so I’ll say “with bullets” not any of the terms that preface them with rubber/plastic/rubberized. A gun is never a nonlethal recourse.

Deep in my psycho mind palace, a forum post long abandoned still swims around. It’s not my writing – it may even be from a Skype message. it is an example of the past reaching through time to grab me by the face.
“Metal Gear Solid punishes the player with violence. Getting spotted or sloppy corrects you with a poorly made combat system.”
Metal Gear Solid, will throw every soldier it can at the player when they fuck up. The main character describes them as holding “Five five sixers and pineapples.” The language of the firearm is taught to me through a game we still often call antiwar. No part of endlessly gunning the soldiers down feels bad until you run out of ammo. Maybe it shouldn’t if we’re smart enough to get the message.

Years later we would, collectively deal with a different sort of trauma. Nobody ever shut the fuck up about Spec Ops: The Line. It was an “anti-war first-person-shooter.” The message of the game rings singularly concluded by the end. “War is bad. If only there was an answer for how it happened this way.”

Here is a video of what it looks and sounds like to fire every gun in Spec Ops: The Line

Videogames aren’t the only form of art that uniquely embraces the firearm. Scroll through Netflix or Hulu and see a dozen covers of men holding guns. Sometimes women too – we’ve got to have women committing war crimes as often as men do. In television the firearm can be a backdrop to a scene. How many cop shows have episodes that start with the bang of a pistol? We always see our handsome leading men hunched over, two hands tightly around their gun. Cradling it close to their chest.

The guns of John Wick are the action. Keanu Reeve’s physicality is matched by his predilection for using as many different guns as he can. A shoot to the foot and a roll to the side. An hour later, grievous bodily harm has just enough levity that a little laughter won’t detract from all of the killing. It looks good to see a gun in John Wick. Like part of a puzzle piece – how and where are the bullets going to end up in bad guys this time?

Firearms are singularly a game mechanic, set dressing – a method of conveying plot through the use of violence. Some people long ago wrote that in videogames, guns are still power ups. We’ve come a long way . Sometimes a grizzled main character will look at one only to say “Aw shucks, wish I didn’t have to kill all of these guys with this gun.” Frequently, though less today then there was at the height of the 4K console era, developers will put out whole videos about how much they respect guns and the armed forces.

There is not a single video game I can think of off the top of my head where someone points a gun at white supremacy, a corrupt government, or any of the other fantasies that I see people talk about online. We point guns at Bad People – but these are always small minded stand ins for something else. We point a whole lot of guns at countries south of the equator. With adventurism must follow its faithful companion.

Last week a journalist was shot in the country I live in with something still being treated as set-dressing by the art form I’ve tried to dedicate my life to. In critical reaction, my mind lurched and spun uncomfortably.
The person in question will have their life irrevocably altered. In a way different than the bodies of all of the black and brown people left in the street. Death at the hands of the police, death in “stand your ground” states by paranoid conservatives. Death at the hands of young American’s headed oversees to fly the flag of their country.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots might be the only game where you spend a lot of time looking down the barrel of an American gun. They sweep the streets of middle-eastern cities, dense jungles and even the arctic. A gun in every place and an American firmly behind it. If we play through “the right way” we never get admonished for killing because we never kill.
Metal Gear Solid V will go on afterwards to give us even more ways to shoot people. We’re told that the faceless enemy across both of these game wants to do us harm. We have an arsenal with which to do it back to them tenfold. There’s really no punishment for as much carnage as you can cause. Hell – if you are setting out to fight like a devil you can look like it too.

The trauma of the firearm is everywhere from our few pieces of anti-war media left to our most outlandish fantasies. Nerds everywhere wait eagerly to give an Orc a gun or an Elf a gun and pass it off as the next, coolest Thing. It’s in our brain and controlling our psyche.

I have a friend who bought a pistol – videogames taught her the ammunition caliber and his parents handled the rest. When he bought it he asked me if he’d somehow fucked up as a citizen. I told him I couldn’t moralize either way, but he pledged to not treat it like a piece of set dressing or something to construct fantasies around. From what I know this meant extensive training on all kinds of shooting ranges. Education on what they’ve been used for and the lives they take. As far as I know, the only time it’s ever been taken out of the box is when she’s on her way to the firing range.

If we’re going to honestly look at the role guns have in our society – we have to start confronting the way we represent them. The way a company like Infinity Ward helps drive the sale of firearms even as they post “#BLM” on twitter or in one of their many soldier-fantasies. There are of course, criticisms starting to roll in like they always do. “What if…we made them feel bad to use?” There will always be outlets that don’t. Deconstructing the imagery of the firearm is going to be necessary. Every fucking cop and jackbooted thug that fires into a crowd prompts the same reaction from most of us. Abject horror. I have another friend who went to the range after the last mass shooting in his state. Not because he had a fantasy of protection – but that’s all he knew to do with his time.

A special, noted thrill of Destiny 2 is the way and weight of shooting the head clean off the shoulders of an enemy. Every time it gets me in the lizard brain. A flash of florescent light from the chest of a Vex. The squish and rattle as something falls to its knees off screen while I’m already putting cross hairs elsewhere. The weight and sound of a bullet flying through the air.
“This is fucking cool.” I said to myself the first time.

It terrifies me that we can still write about this with any kind of distance. It terrifies me that guns are still – and will probably always be cool. The way to decentralize the way the world turns violence on the people living in it probably won’t ever be making something “uncool” but maybe it’s going to take starting with “unacceptable”. Maybe until every turkey-necked motherfucker that cradles his sidearm to his chest in a room with three hundred others getting told “criminals are the enemy and people are criminals” is empty handed we won’t even be able to process our trauma.