With your downtime this week, consider one of these classic films. You’ve probably seen all three, but here’s a new lens through which to rewatch them.
Die Hard
Notable weapons:
Beretta 92F
Heckler & Koch P7
Heckler & Koch MP5
Steyr AUG
This is much more a gun movie than it is a Christmas movie, but more than most ‘80s action movies, the guns are characters here. Die Hard is half the reason you want an MP5 (Tom Clancy’s cultural influence is the other half), and it put the Steyr AUG on the map.
A Christmas Story
Notable weapons:
An official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range-model air rifle with a compass in the stock
As David Yamane says, guns are normal and normal people use guns. (See “OSD 135: A sociologist walks into a B.A.R.” and “OSD 207: The FAL is coming from inside the house” for more.) What better captures that than a movie where the entire plot revolves around a kid wanting an air rifle for Christmas. To hear A Christmas Story tell it, a gun isn’t just neutral, it’s downright wholesome. And what’s more it’s wholesome for children. Really positive culture-building here.
Home Alone
Notable weapons:
Buzz McCallister’s pump-action BB gun
Colt 1921AC Thompson (in Angels with Filthy Souls movie-within-a-movie)
Electric barbecue starter
Blowtorch
Iron
Broken glass
Micromachines
Paint cans
Tripwire
Tarantula
Snow shovel
Home Alone is Die Hard for kids. It combines Die Hard and A Christmas Story by taking “guns are normal and normal people use guns” utterly for granted; applying that normalcy to the Die Hard-ish pastime of waging a self-defense insurgency on Christmas Eve; and putting the gun — and more importantly the agency — into the hands of a child.
Enjoy your time with loved ones this week, ya filthy animals.
This week’s links
Fun fact about the Home Alone shot where Marv takes a BB to the face
“This is a true story, we paid a guy living in his mother’s basement in Chicago $600 to hand paint that BB going into Marv’s head,” [Home Alone director Chris Columbus] told Insider. “So that was an animated effect. A guy with a paintbrush in a basement for six frames hand-painted a BB. This was an $18 million film, so, for our budget, I’m pretty happy how it turned out.”
Concorde engine for sale on eBay
Not gun-related, but up your alley. A cool £565,000 (~$716,000) for you to have the coolest living room decor in town.
“The intense rules for US Marines who protected mail from gangsters”
Dispatches from the 1920s:
“When our Corps goes in as guards over the mail, that mail must be delivered,” wrote Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby. “Or there must be a Marine dead at the post of duty. There can be no compromise.”
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Merch
Gun apparel you’ll want to wear out of the house.