• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 10, 2024

Hold one in your hand and you will look sexy, self-confident, and oh-so cool. 

That’s a message that was once sent out far and wide in movies and TV shows about cigarettes. 

But it occurred to me recently that if you substitute the word “gun” for “cigarette,” you wouldn’t have to change a thing. In today’s entertainment media, guns are the new cigarettes. 

Cigarettes have been uncool for years. When they are seen in movies and TV shows today, it is most often in the context of period pieces from the past when almost everyone smoked.

TV promoted the practice and profited handsomely from tobacco advertising for its first two decades until cigarette commercials were banned starting on New Year’s Day 1971.

Today, when characters are seen smoking in those period-piece TV shows, the word “smoking” is even included in today’s obligatory content warnings at the start of shows, along with language, sex, substances, suicides and violence.

Smoking? What about guns -- brandishing them, making threats with them, firing them and killing people with them?

Some might say the “violence” warning covers all that, but applying one word to encapsulate the entire wide spectrum of violence on TV today is puny and inadequate. 

Why not include the word “guns” along with “smoking”? In the context of today’s entertainment, guns are the go-to power tool. 

Use them for settling disputes, suggest our movies and TV shows -- and look great while doing it!

Keira Knightley is a movie star with international glamor. See her in the photo above? Not only is she the face of Chanel, she’s also a rootin’, tootin’, gun-totin’, sexy spy in the Netflix series “Black Doves,” which premiered last week. 

In this show as in so many others, the gun is not just some tool she uses to face foes and pacify perps. It is a fashion accessory.

Once upon a time, so were cigarettes. In Hollywood’s Golden Age, cigarettes and the style in which they were smoked were part of the whole outfit. 

The TV Blog does not mean to single out Keira Knightley. It just so happens that the above photo came to light in a search of Netflix’s publicity stash at a point last week when I was considering “Black Doves” for a review.

The gun-as-fashion-statement goes far beyond that show. The glamorous image of the gun in our video and motion-picture entertainment is so ingrained that nobody even notices it anymore.

But if the sight of someone smoking a cigarette is considered harmful enough for some that content warnings actually include cigarettes, doesn’t it stand to reason that the sight of a gun might be triggering too (no pun intended)?

One assumes the cigarette warning is aimed chiefly at those who might be persuaded to take up smoking after seeing it on a TV show. 

Or the sight of a cigarette might remind someone of a relative who died from smoking (more than 480,000 American die per year from smoke-related illnesses, says the Centers for Disease Control). 

More than 46,000 Americans were killed with guns in 2023, according to the CDC. They had loved ones too. For them, casual gunplay on TV might be something they would like to avoid whenever possible.

The sight of guns might also influence others to use guns, in deadly situations or otherwise.

Last week, in the heart of midtown Manhattan, a young man assassinated the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

When seen on the surveillance-camera footage that captured the whole thing, one might wonder whether the suspect (Luigi Mangione, 26, nabbed on Monday in Pennsylvania), was professionally trained somewhere in the assassination arts, complete with silencer.

Or did he learn what to do, and how to do it, from movies and TV shows?