At first the 80's graphics and synthesized music led me to expect a sleazy exploitation movie, but the eloquent and forcefully delivered commentary - the statistics are often scarier than the images - reassured me as the film progressed that it seemed seriously intended.
Much of the footage I'd never seen before - such as JFK arriving at Love Field and being driven through Dallas in colour - although other film used frequently seemed to veer away from whatever central argument the film was actually advancing. At one point the film wistfully speaks of a more innocent era a quarter of a century earlier; but the increasing proliferation of atrocity footage such as we see here probably owes as much to the fact that cameras - and now mobile phones - are now ever-present to record such incidents.
If the film is about America's morbid love affair with the gun, the mass poisoning of his followers ordered by the Reverend Jim Jones doesn't really belong here; while like the summary execution of Viet Cong commander Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon on 1 February 1968, which is also included, it took place thousands of miles from the United States itself. Other material - like several photographs of suicide victims - seem to have been included because the film's makers didn't want them to go to waste rather than because they were particularly relevant. Likewise serial killers like the creepy Ted Bundy and the remarkably articulate Ed Kemper don't really seem to belong in this particular documentary since they didn't shoot their victims.
Another startling clip that I'd never seen before was of Lyndon Johnson himself in black & white after the University of Texas shooting in 1966 - over FIFTY YEARS ago!! - pledging new measures to prevent guns falling into the wrong hands. Before 1966 was out, America had already seen its first copycat shooting by an idiot called Robert Smith who committed a particularly cruel and cowardly mass shooting in a beauty salon in Arizona on 12 November 1966, after which he explained that "I wanted to get known - to get myself a name". (He's still in jail now, and I'd ironically never heard of him before; so much for making a name for himself!) Some of the 'reasons' we hear in the film are almost comically banal, while Sirhan Sirhan, as usual, seemed genuinely not to have a clue why he'd murdered Robert Kennedy.
Like the clip of LBJ, the scariest thing about this film is that it was made 37 years ago and so little has changed in the intervening years. The latest mass shooting in America happened in - guess where? - Texas less than two weeks ago, and by the time you read this there'll doubtless have been plenty of others.
Much of the footage I'd never seen before - such as JFK arriving at Love Field and being driven through Dallas in colour - although other film used frequently seemed to veer away from whatever central argument the film was actually advancing. At one point the film wistfully speaks of a more innocent era a quarter of a century earlier; but the increasing proliferation of atrocity footage such as we see here probably owes as much to the fact that cameras - and now mobile phones - are now ever-present to record such incidents.
If the film is about America's morbid love affair with the gun, the mass poisoning of his followers ordered by the Reverend Jim Jones doesn't really belong here; while like the summary execution of Viet Cong commander Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon on 1 February 1968, which is also included, it took place thousands of miles from the United States itself. Other material - like several photographs of suicide victims - seem to have been included because the film's makers didn't want them to go to waste rather than because they were particularly relevant. Likewise serial killers like the creepy Ted Bundy and the remarkably articulate Ed Kemper don't really seem to belong in this particular documentary since they didn't shoot their victims.
Another startling clip that I'd never seen before was of Lyndon Johnson himself in black & white after the University of Texas shooting in 1966 - over FIFTY YEARS ago!! - pledging new measures to prevent guns falling into the wrong hands. Before 1966 was out, America had already seen its first copycat shooting by an idiot called Robert Smith who committed a particularly cruel and cowardly mass shooting in a beauty salon in Arizona on 12 November 1966, after which he explained that "I wanted to get known - to get myself a name". (He's still in jail now, and I'd ironically never heard of him before; so much for making a name for himself!) Some of the 'reasons' we hear in the film are almost comically banal, while Sirhan Sirhan, as usual, seemed genuinely not to have a clue why he'd murdered Robert Kennedy.
Like the clip of LBJ, the scariest thing about this film is that it was made 37 years ago and so little has changed in the intervening years. The latest mass shooting in America happened in - guess where? - Texas less than two weeks ago, and by the time you read this there'll doubtless have been plenty of others.