Word: gunning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pulls a ring out of a punk's nose, shoots his rival's face off through a pillow) and takes it (gets punched, switch-bladed, shot and, ick, toe-hammered). The Matrix, the first 1999 film to hit $100 million at the box office, has more kung fu than gun fu but still brandishes an arsenal of firepower in its tale of outsiders against the Internet droids...
Some images in recent films are both repellent and (the tricky part) exciting. Some song lyrics express a rage that's not easy to take as irony. And, yes, a movie or song or TV show may inspire some sick twist to earn satanic stardom with a gun. But most kids deserve the respect their parents wanted when they were kids: to be able to consume bits of pop culture and decide on their own whether it's poetry, entertainment or junk...
...massacre in Colorado did raise a serious issue, yet again: gun control. Newspapers all over the world published sanctimonious editorials about the "American gun culture." The National Rifle Association went on sensitivity alert; in a rare moment of self-effacement it canceled the festive public events and gun show planned around its annual meeting, but not the meeting itself, which by coincidence is scheduled for this week in Denver...
...anti-gun forces took some energy from public outrage over the shootings. California's assembly approved a bill designed to limit handgun sales. The gun lobby in Colorado had been expecting to get passage of three bills (to loosen restrictions on concealed-weapons permits, to ban local lawsuits against manufacturers and to pre-empt local ordinances on firearms). State legislators quickly withdrew two of them, and Governor Bill Owens promised to veto the third. Earlier in April, Missouri voters defeated a referendum to lift a constitutional ban on concealed weapons. So far this year, New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska have...
...witnessing the beginning of one of those tectonic shifts in our culture and morality: the terror haunting the gun industry is the precedent of tobacco. At some point in the last couple of generations, smoking became disreputable in American life--a sort of moral consensus formed. If juries were to start awarding damages to cities, or to individual gunshot victims, extracting millions from gun manufacturers, or at least forcing them to mount expensive defenses in hundreds of suits, then it is possible that the N.R.A. and other defenders of the gun might abandon their cold-dead-hand absolutism and begin...