The reluctant hero (who just happens to be armed to the teeth/a former karate expert/skilled in the use of guns) thing is a recurrent trope.unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Didn't McClane lift most of his weapons off the bad guys in that movie? If you were going for absurd on purpose, you could have put Naked Gun or Super Troopers in there.
I'm not an expert on Die Hard lore, from wikipedia
The point is its another media portrayal of an angry and dysfunctional man who achieves hero status by extra-judicially killing a bunch of people who are apparently 'bad guys', when he could have left the building and left it to the Police.John McClane was originally based on the fictional character Detective Joe Leland from Roderick Thorp's bestselling novel, Nothing Lasts Forever. Other aspects are derived from Frank Malone from Walter Wager's novel 58 Minutes (adapted as Die Hard 2).
Die Hard villain Hans Gruber describes him as "just another American.... who thinks he's John Wayne," to which McClane replies that he "was always partial to Roy Rogers." He is described as being a "foul-mouthed, wisecracking, no-nonsense New York cop with an itchy trigger finger ... and a never-say-die maverick spirit."
McClane's marriage is in a constant state of crisis, his vigilantism and disregard for authority have put him in danger of losing his job more than once, and he is a chain-smoker who is described by Inspector Cobb in Die Hard with a Vengeance as being "two steps away from becoming a full blown alcoholic", which McClane jokingly corrects him saying only "one step".
McClane was not an LAPD cop, he was in NYPD, as far as I know Police in the US aren't allowed to roam the continent blowing people away if they feel like it.
The situation with the public and the police in America now seems to be that as soon as someone is perceived to be a 'bad guy' its OK to kill them, even if they've done nothing and are running away.
Its more a comment on the equating of gun murders being an acceptable and unavoidable consequence of the 2nd amendment with people accidentally killing others in car crashes being an inevitable consequence of car ownership. I used the image of someone murdering people with a car to highlight the point.e: It's also weird to me that you use the deadly car analogy in seeming mockery of actual gun control, yet follow up by condemning violence in media. Am I looking at this too straight on? Am I missing something.
I am a gun owner, I'm thoroughly in favour of very tight gun control so that I can hopefully not be murdered but still keep my guns.
The situation in Australia is fairly slack TBH, more than half the gun owners I come into contact with are morons with some sort of fetish or latent fantasy inherent in their desire to own guns. There's been an explosion lately in applications for licences, I suspect its due to the Walking Dead TV show, there are so few places where hunting is actually permitted the goggle-eyed numpties must be shoulder to shoulder at the weekend, or sitting at home stroking them waiting for the zombie apocalypse, I dunno. Even the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for social collapse.
In America the level of gun hoarding and fetishising is fucking nuts.
I can continue the guns/cars analogy. People are driving around in SUVs because they think it makes them safer when the statistics show the opposite, and they're arming themselves and resisting sensible gun controls because they think it makes it safer for them when the statistics show the opposite.
There seems to be no rationality, except everyone wants to be 'safer' than the guy next to them, never mind it makes things more dangerous for everyone including themselves.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-01-29 01:47:36)
Fuck Israel
