Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Secretly, Americans Love Guns. Watch 'The Walking Dead.'

The apocalyptic-thriller genre exposes a deep-set fear that arms are the only reliable safeguard against catastrophe.

March 29, 2018 at 2:46 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Aiming at the screen.
Photographer: John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

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I don’t know how the debate over gun control is going to play out. But there’s a challenge at the heart of the matter to which we pay too little attention.

Secretly, Americans love guns — if not the actual physical devices then at least the abstract idea. We say we don’t, but our collective id, as represented by what we watch on the screen, suggests otherwise. Because for every police procedural where the suspect who swears he’s innocent finds his licensed handgun missing from its lockbox, there are two popular post-apocalyptic thrillers where the possession of firearms is the only ticket to survival.