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My first post

a soldier in all of us

On Saturday last week Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson.

While there may be many reasons that lead a loner gunman to commit such atrocities, one must wonder why such events are far more common in the US than in any other large developed nation: More Americans were killed in the US between 1979 and 1997 than in all Foreign Wars fought since 1776*.

The same day Giffords was shot, I stepped off the 6 train and saw this ad for Call of Duty, Black Ops.

I realized that large scale and unrestricted exposure to gun imagery in the US (from Hollywood posters to video game ads and Marines parading at the start of baseball games) not only slowly makes "guns OK", it also imbeds in our culture the notion that taking a life with a bullet can be justified.

Once we accept it's OK for the Good Guys to kill Bad Guys, all that stands between murder and "justice" is a good reason.

It's time to reconsider the indiscriminate use of weapons in advertising: in a country where people take issue with nudity (remember Janet Jackson's nipple?) no one seems to mind when thousands of guns are shown in advertising everyday.

*the brady campaign