What "Lord of War" tells us about guns

[Paladin]

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/evans/060302

"Peter & Helen Evans
March 2, 2006


"Guns kill people" was what the makers of the movie Lord of War kept hammering into our minds. In the opening scene, our viewpoint is manufactured into a bullet. Then, from a bullet's-eye-view, we take a voyage overseas, get smuggled across a border by dark-skinned ne'er-do-wells, loaded into an assault rifle and aimed at a young, innocent boy. We never see anyone pull a trigger. What we see is the last brief trajectory in the life of a bullet, down the barrel of the gun into the brain of the cowering boy. Splat! Intense.

[Somehow this inanimate object can accomplish all this without the use of a human being.]

However, since the makers of the movie knew we'd soon shake off that inanimate point of view, they introduced us to the main character, Yuri Orlov, played by Nicholas Cage, a second generation American who made it out of the Russian immigrant ghetto by learning to run guns. He was rationalizing all the time that people would go on buying guns, whether he was the one who supplied them or not. He stood for the gun manufacturers in the audience's mind. We were supposed to see that supplying guns was the source of all the world's violence. A cute added twist was a subplot including his wife whom he tricked into marrying him, but whose parents were shot to death in a home-invasion robbery. The implication being that, if guns weren't on the street, the criminals wouldn't have killed her parents.

You see where all this is going. It's guns that kill people. The motives, morality and intentions of people were not taken into account. If someone picks up a gun, they are automatically going to kill someone. It's as if the gun had some magical power over anyone who touches it. Never once did the movie makers consider that some people are just plain bad and choose guns to do their dirty work, be it burglary or genocide.

As the movie progresses Nicholas Cage's character moves up to international arms dealing, supplying weapons to tyrannical regimes. We see the degenerate seediness of these countries, how the government has intimidated the populace into a "life-is-cheap" fatalism. Are we to suppose they would all start building hospitals and attending school and church if only, if only guns didn't exist?

In one of the last scenes, Yuri and his brother find themselves sealing the "one, last deal" on a hill above a refugee detention center. His brother knows what the guns are for and wants to cancel, but Yuri holds firm that "it's none of our business." We watch, helplessly, as a small child runs out of the tent village, his horrified mother rushing to retrieve him. Next a jeep full of enforcers speed toward them, jump out with machetes raised and hack the mother and child to death. That job will soon be made easier by the guns that were just purchased. So, let's see what we are to conclude from this scene. That these people would live in freedom and happiness if the evil guns were not available. We don't think so, for even though it's hard work, machetes can still do the job. We all heard about the hand-hewn genocide in Rwanda.

For us, the movie provided still more evidence that a dis-armed populace is just prime for tyranny, oppression and, ultimately, slaughter. And that's not a metaphor. It's sickening because it's true in too many parts of the world. We bet that if that fictional mother had a gun, the jeep full of machete-wielding bad guys would think twice. In fact, we know it.

A lawfully armed populace is the only way to ensure freedom. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Only criminals kill the innocent with intentional malice. That's the message we should get from this movie."


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I saw the movie and these authors are correct. It was pretty obvious that the movie was an IANSA sponsored piece of propaganda. Just another tool to gain support for a worldwide ban on no-government owned firearms. They even have an interview with somebody from IANSA in the additional materials on the DVD.

Funny part is how the director said that while he was making the movie, he met several arms dealers and said they were actually nice people. Of course that didn't stop them from doing this attack piece... but hey it's the movies.

[ghentry]

The director failed. After watching this movie I didn't think about how evil guns were, I thought about how evil mankind can be.

[TxFire]

Ditto to above.