According to a recent Harris Poll, the American public – 63% of it – wants stricter gun control in general, and 73% favor tighter control over handguns. Even gun owners themselves (62%) want better control of the distribution of handguns, but not over guns generally (only 47%).

That’s what the public wants, and that’s what gun owners want. What does the Gov’mint want? We’ve said it before in this column: the Gov’mint wants gun confiscation. It wants a disarmed public. It appears to be accomplishing that agenda on guns through a process of incrementalism. It hopes the gun laws that are in place right now don’t work. This is evidenced by the fact that it is making little effort – as compared to previous administrations – to enforce them. With each gun-related incident, the hue and cry for stricter gun controls goes up, and that is followed by more, and tougher, legislation (which of course is not enforced, so it doesn’t work). Eventually, the only thing left to do will be to make all gun ownership illegal. American citizens will then have lost their constitutional right to bear arms.

How can we prevent this from happening?

We probably can’t. But we might be able to slow the process down. How? By changing the way we depict the use of guns in popular culture.

My wife Lorraine and I enjoy viewing the various British police procedurals that come our way via the PBS program "Mystery." All kinds of Scotland Yard inspectors – Morse, Frost, et al – find ways to solve crimes without the use of guns. One can watch program after program, and never see a gun drawn or fired. These cerebral inspectors solve problems with their brains, not with guns or with their fists. Arrests are often made by stealth, rather than in a Fourth of July chase scene involving myriad car crashes and hails of bullets all culminating in a climactic explosion.

If you watch these British mysteries over time, you get the impression that crimes can be solved largely without guns, and that guns are, at best, a last resort, and only when the criminals have them and use them first. For years, British police officers didn’t even carry guns in the course of their regular duties.

If you watch the average police procedural here in the USA, guns are ever present and often fired. Destructive car chases are a staple of virtually every episode. Typically much property is destroyed and many people die or are wounded in the apprehension of a single criminal. Our criminal "investigations" wind up as apocalyptic displays of pyrotechnics. The "Dirty Harry" series is a classic case in point.

Just as advertising on television works, so image-making on television works. It’s a matter of monkey-see, monkey-do. Our media moguls, our Hollywood producers, and our 18-24-year old movie scriptwriters have created the image that modern America is merely a high-tech Old West frontier. Grown men with lantern jaws and adolescent mentalities wield laser guns and blow things up in the process of apprehending (?) the bad guys. Of course it’s also getting harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Kid’s electronic games reinforce the idea that people with special weapons and powers can destroy all monsters, human or alien. It’s a crock.

The world of movies and television is a fantasy world. Real life is slower, uglier, lower tech, and much more complicated. Criminal behavior is the end result of long chains of cause & effect factors involving various manifestations of human nature. The apprehension and trying of criminals involves mountains of tedious paper work, armies of expensive lawyers poring over myriad technicalities, and tens of thousands – or millions -- of dollars changing hands. Hollywood depicts a world of predictable simplicity. Sooner or later, the gun is someone’s power, or someone else’s solution. It’s simply not that way in real life.

Of course I’m dreaming if I think Hollyweird will change its formula. Violence and pyrotechnics sell – especially to the kids, who constitute the main movie-going audience these days. The kind of violent rock videos, role-playing video games, and movies that creative cesspool is spewing out these days is probably aiding the Gov’mint’s program of population disarmament more than anyone realizes.

The Gov’mint’s incremental disarming of the populace is but one link in the chain of development leading to a Big Brother society. But why should we grease the slide by providing tomorrow’s tyrants with ammunition, rationale, and emotional impetus? That which they do, they will do quickly enough.