TV Reviews : America’s Love Affair With Firearms

Forget cocaine--guns have clearly become the premier American drug of choice. And it’s hitting the TV airwaves in a big way this weekend. Whether it’s the deadly serious “60 Minutes” segment, “Bang, Bang, You’re Dead” (at 7 p.m. Sunday on CBS), or the ironic and mordant “Guns and Violence” episode of the delicious series “The 90’s” (at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28), the message is clear: Like any full-time user, Americans are paying a heavy price for their firearms habit.

“Guns and Violence” is, like all “The 90’s” programs, a collage of independent video pieces cleverly stitched together to form a tapestry. The picture that emerges is a culture of fear. Reasonable women fed up “with being the victim,” as gun trainer Paxton Quigley terms it, are resorting to packing Magnums (Mace, apparently, will no longer do).

The whiz-bang structure and tone of “Guns and Violence” is revved up in such a way to undercut the straight-on deadliness of precisely the TV reporting we see Morley Safer deliver in the “60 Minutes” segment. Both programs tell us that more than 200 million firearms are piling up in the United States, and that with the rise of gun ownership has come an increase in the accidental deaths of children playing with guns.

Safer’s coverage is a kind of grim masterpiece of “60 Minutes” reportage, while “Guns and Violence” intercuts the facts with body-blows of irreverence.

Still, if Safer’s “Bang, Bang, You’re Dead” doesn’t spark the nation to examine its collective conscience, nothing will. Like a medieval death march, one mother after another relates how their son or daughter was killed or paralyzed by a gun accidentally fired by a playmate--or, in the most tragic instances, by a sibling.

At first, it appears that this is a set-up for a gun control appeal. But there’s a deeply moral twist in these stories that upends the familiar polarization between gun controllers and National Rifle Assn. members. Three of these grieving mothers, who might have understandably withdrawn from the human race, instead spearheaded legislation in their states (California, Florida and Connecticut) mandating parental responsibility for such deadly accidents.

These mark commendable reversals of heavy personal losses into social victories, but they leave open the question: Can the American addiction to guns and individual responsibility mix?