TV REVIEW : ‘Showcase’ Looks at Gun-Happy America

In “Guns, Guns, Guns,” tonight’s overly bloody installment of the NBC News documentary series “Summer Showcase,” anchor Connie Chung and crew tour America to show the deadly toll that handguns are taking (10 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39).

Correspondent Bill Schechner talks to parents of schoolchildren in Winnetka, Ill., the sleepy suburb where a local woman known for her looniness legally purchased a handgun and walked into a grade school and methodically started shooting students.

Maria Shriver visits Los Angeles’ gang war zone for a segment on handguns and minors. Chung’s segment on domestic violence takes her to Gainesville, Tex., where she recounts how a woman calmly pawned her wedding ring for a pistol and used it to kill her two kids and herself.

Lucky Severson, meanwhile, reports from America’s crime capital, Miami, which is in a handgun-happy state whose liberalized gun laws have made it even easier to get permits to carry concealed guns.

Along with scenes of funerals and emotional interviews with relatives of the dead come such interesting though often imprecise, unclear and disconnected facts as that 22,000 people are killed in the United States each year by handguns. (Surprisingly, 12,000 are by suicide and 2,200 occur during the commission of crimes, the program reports--but it never accounts for the remaining 9,800 cases.)

Overall, “Guns, Guns, Guns” seems more interested in shocking than informing. When it has the perfect chance to provide some hard facts about the effects of Florida’s liberalized handgun laws, it spouts generalities and offers a trauma-unit doctor’s assessment that he “thinks” there’s been a recent increase in gunshot wounds.

“Guns, Guns, Guns” reaches no conclusion except that there are a lot of handguns out there now (60 million handguns in U.S. homes) and there will be more in the future. Produced by Don Bowers, it rather simplistically places most of the blame for the human carnage on the handguns themselves--rather than on the people pulling the triggers.

Probably the hour’s most serious shortcoming, however, is its oversensationalistic approach. It includes far too many pops of gunfire (real and simulated) and way too much bloody footage of shooting victims (including a gratuitously graphic close-up of the blood on Robert F. Kennedy’s face).