Act III.

Vintage ad for the Johnny Seven O.M.A. (One Man Army), from Topper Toys

There is, of course, no proven link between exposure to fictional violence at a tender age and sociopathic behavior as an adult; the copycat crimes routinely cited by the shoot-your-TV school of media criticism are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Rather, as argued earlier, it’s the tidal wave of cheap, readily available guns inundating our culture that  accounts for our unenviable first-place status, among industrialized nations, in gun violence: homicides, suicides, accidental shootings.

Still, the blood tide of fantasy gunplay washing over the American mind, practically from birth, must have some effect, if only to implant in our collective consciousness the seductive lie that, if all else fails–if you’re suicidally despondent, like my friends’ father; or a demented nonentity like Mark David Chapman; or a grinning paranoiac like Jared Lee Loughner, mind swirling with the free-floating fears of the lunatic fringe–there’s always a magic bullet.