The implication of every Indiana Jones, every Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is that these gentleman thieves eventually plan on leaving their discoveries somewhere the rest of the world can benefit. I hate to dropquote in the beginning of an article, but “the rest of the world” often means “parts of the world primarily inhabited by white people”. There is a museum in England somewhere hosting every Jones-like artifact stolen from another country.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves tells you the subtext up front: These charismatic travelers are no more than thieves who tell themselves they have great purpose. Often, they deal in the kind of knowledge we use in pulp storytelling as occult iconography. Remnants of a time when people were still afraid of flames that did not burn orange, of lines and patterns that did not come together to depict ‘God’.

Nathan Drake is our archetypal hero. Even though his job is to steal, kill and steal again: he ultimately tries to obsess himself with what’s right in the short term. Save a life. Keep a gun from being fired. Discover a secret lost to time. To what end I don’t know: I’m keeping up with this series in real time. Don’t consider me an expert of Nathan Drake.

During the time we commonly refer to culturally in America as “The War on Terror” the Pentagon (that institution which seems to do little more than fuck up and kill people) lost track of over 1.45 million firearms in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most went to security forces, but thousands of assault rifles and pistols wound up in the hands of civilians all over the middle east. Aftermarket M4’s and M16’s from previous wars filtered into hands that were all too eager to put them to good use.

These are, of course, numbers offered up by a state that primarily concerns itself with the duties of Killing As Many People as Possible and Occasionally Sending Social Security Checks. Every once in a great, and I do mean great while, a private researcher runs the same numbers. Numbers that often come up triple or quadruple the official numbers. War means moving lots of bullets and rifles – sometimes without signing any paperwork at all.

Of course we always – always love to say that these guns end up in the hands of “terrorists” because that’s a great scare word to put in the hearts and minds of our great conservative people. Every bullet fired at an American Soldier or Citizen by someone from elsewhere is not a product of a military industrial complex bent on flooding rivers with bullets, but bad actors etc etc etc.

I want to laugh every time Nathan Drake reloads. Fumbling a magazine to the ground and leaving it where it lay. Maybe there’s still a handful of spare rounds left. The amount of times I’ve stress reloaded in the game, dumping a half full magazine on the streets of some other country or in some hidden cursed temple cannot be counted.
Back home, here in America, this would be the kind of stuff conservatives everywhere feign outrage over. How did the rebels (whoever we’re mad at today) get these guns? These tanks? Never mind that our own police officers have access to whatever firearms the would be jarheads in blue missed out on murdering people with overseas. There are brown people breaking windows somewhere!

I kept catching myself wondering where all of the guns come from in Uncharted 2. Except when I really, really don’t need to shoot anything, Nathan Drake always has a trusty firearm at his side. They are less abstract than the guns of older shooters – here they once again have real names and models. Even if for the purpose of game balance that an Ak47 shoots a seemingly random cone of bullets, I at least know what to expect when I pick one up. The same for an M4 or a 9mm. The same for a Mauser or Shotgun.

The villains this time all have the kind of European accents that implies they’re the worst kind of badguy (for doing imperialism against other white people) and tons of money and guns to back it up. Those guns have to come from somewhere. In real life if I want to go shooting I need to buy ammo, buy a gun. An interaction that can (in most states) only be done face to face with another person. Here there are guns anywhere I need them, ready to be discarded.

Swapping an AK47 for an M4 for a Shotgun, I wander through the streets of a foreign city. The people I kill all look enough like me but sound just dissimilar I don’t feel bad filling them full of lead. Every time I pick up a new gun I leave the old one behind for whoever comes after me. Uncharted 2 tells me there are guerrillas in this city rebelling against something. They seem to be defending themselves against an onslaught of nationalistic European soldiers that claim no country. I find myself wondering what kid is going to pick up my discarded rifle and use it to kill someone.

A funny thing about the way imperialism functions is that no matter what we’re trying to steal: whether we’re the morally righteous-in-the-moment Nathan Drake ala Uncharted or Lara Croft, we really like to leave our guns behind. State sanctioned military actions are no different than the ones carried out by private military companies. The most direct form of United States sanctioned terrorism is that for the most part, gun manufacturers can sell wherever they want with impunity.

Now my battles lead me into the mountains and jungles of Tibet. Every round fired hopefully finds the body I intend it to be in, but just like usual dozens of pistols and assault rifles go discarded Will they be there for whoever comes after me? Nathan Drake is American, and if you can’t tell from his “I belong here” swagger it’s easy enough to pick up on it from how much he loves finding guns wherever he goes. A little piece of home. “I use guns all the time.” he tells one character – the direct translation in American English is “Hell yeah I’ll kill a motherfucker.”

There’s a record of everywhere we’ve ever been as a country. It’s not in the Golden Arches of our favorite burger company or the red labels of coca cola. It’s in guns and steel-framed rifles. Whether from today’s conflict or yesterdays. Even in the realm of videogames now, we have to ask ourselves where are all of these guns coming from. Left behind by explorers like Nathan Drake who ludonarritively see the bullet as a solution to every problem, or by our own armed forces? We, the player, are instrumental in the export of firearms into digital worlds.

Someone has to be putting guns in the hands of all of these Bad Guys. They’ve gotta be getting the Kevlar vests and tactical equipment from someone. Judging from the fact that the only reason I can tell Nathan Drake isn’t shooting at other Americans is their accent, let’s assume they’re buying it all from the same country. We’ve gotta be #1 at something, right? In real life, we love to sell guns to South America. It’s legal for Colt, an American manufacturer – to sell their guns wherever they want. It is also legal for the United States to deny the right of entry people from countries those guns have destroyed. Much the same as the corporate class knows no borders, neither do bullets.

THE LAST OF US PART II released a week ago. It is impossible for me to ignore the pedigree of Uncharted hanging over it. It is the same crypto-archealogical game style. Wander through the ruins of another civilization while people try to kill you. This time the powers of imperialism are absent, because the ruins are ruins of The United States of America. Our guns stuck around, even if most of us didn’t. Perhaps in that way it still carries the spirit Uncharted always kept hidden beneath the surface. We’re digging through the sand of another world, the treasured relic replaced by the common firearm. Our guns persist in the ruined cities we’ve sold them to. Our own military can’t even figure out a way to get rid of them when the order comes down to pack up all of the murderers and ship them back to Chicago or Phoenix or wherever. We bomb our own munitions depots and create easy access to whoever wants them when the locks disappear in the fire. If we don’t otherwise sell them off when it’s time to end the sortie, police action, war on terror. I sit at home, listening to the conversations in Uncharted 2 punctuated with the percussive rings of gunfire.