Out here, due process is a bullet. Those words were uttered by the Duke himself, John Wayne, in his 1968 film Green Berets . President Clinton joined the fray last month by asking movie studios to voluntarily keep guns out of movie trailers. Yet many experts say it's worth noting that firearms have a long history in American popular culture. When I lead people on tours of the museum, they are amazed to see how much guns were part of our past, how they were needed for just getting food or basic protection.
Firearms are part of our history.
Gun-toting heroes have dominated both the big and small screen since the middle of this century. However, even before the heyday of Westerns, firearms were a staple of American art, literature, and song. Early American paintings often depicted a man walking into the woods with his gun or ax, and pulp novels, which frequently featured heroes with guns, were extremely popular in the 1930s and '40s. There is a famous old blues song written in the 1920s called '44 Blues' in which the singer is looking for his lover and threatens to shoot her with his gun. Also, many ballads in the 18th and 19th century centered around love and death, and included references to shooting or stabbing.