UNDER THE GUN

Narrated by Katie Couric.
Featuring Mark Barden, Jackie Barden, Pamela Bosley, Shannon Watts, Richard Martinez, Sandy Phillips, Lonnie Phillips, Gabrielle Gifford, Mark Kelly, Victoria Montgomery, Michael Pfleger, Mark Follman, William Vizzard, Robyn Thomas, Tom Diaz, Michael Waldman, Richard Feldman and Robin Kelly.
Writers: Brian Lazarte, Mark Monroe and Stephanie Soechtig.
Director: Stephanie Soechtig.

Rating: 4.5/5

The form and functionality of the modern ‘advocacy documentary’ genre reaches tragic and infuriating new heights in the heartbreaking arms-control exposé, Under the Gun.

Combining layered research, focussed discussion and harrowing accounts of shootings and their devastating aftermath, director Stephanie Soechtig and narrator/EP Katie Couric construct an indelibly moving and quietly shattering examination of the state of firearm violence and the fight for regulation in the wake of a wave of horrific mass shootings. Having shed cold light on the fast food industry in 2014’s Fed Up, the pair employs a similarly fearless tact in their dissection of the social, industrial and political forces that continue to obstruct the legal and constitutional reform needed to bring about common-sense change.

No study of the impact of guns on American society could be complete without insight into the upper echelon role of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the fear baiting 2^nd Amendment rhetoric of its leader, Wayne LaPierre. Also revealed in full is the extant of arms manufacturing industry funding that flows into the Association's coffers and the long history of powerbrokers sitting in the NRA boardrooms, from where some of the most hardline lobbying, political influence and legal maneuvering in American social history has been formulated.  

Under the Gun is not the first documentary to point out that rich, white men working in a moral vacuum and motivated by profit are a primary source of America’s ills; most recently, Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated (and stylistically similar) 13^th noted historical precedent in the ongoing oppression of and subsequent commercial gain from locking up America’s black population. Alongside angry works like Richard Todd’s Frackman (2015), Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989), Chris Paine’s Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006), and Josh Fox’s Gasland, Parts 1 (2010) and 2 (2013), a picture emerges of a modern society misused and abused in the name of capitalism, careening towards an inevitable restructuring on the back of a new wave of activism.

The profits-over-people approach of the gun industry is brought into sharper focus when viewed through the prism of soul-crushing grief. Soechtig and Couric (who remains off-camera) capture the fragile existential void being lived by: The Barden family, who lost 7 year-old son Daniel, one of 20 children killed at Sandy Hook; Lonnie and Sandy Phillips, parents of slain Aurora theatre patron, Jessica Ghawi; Pamela and Tom Bosley, whose son Terrell was shot in a Chicago church carpark; and, Richard Martinez, father of murdered 20 year-old college student Chris, one of six people killed in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Exhibiting the determination of spirit required to recover from the impact of a shooting is former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, one of 19 shot in January 2011 outside a Tucson grocery store; six died.

Footage of the mass murders and other gun violence (including one blackly funny moment of self-inflicted pain) is used with the utmost respect by the production, yet remains truly shocking and deeply affecting. In particular, CCTV footage of patrons fleeing the Aurora cinema complex to the audio of the 911 pleas of those trapped inside (“I’m only seventeen,” screams one caller) are impossible to forget. 

Detractors will cite an unevenness of debate; that the NRA members may not have been afforded fair right of reply or been misrepresented.* But the NRA has wielded its influence with a loud voice for more than 145 years. It would be an act of callous inhumanity to cry foul of Soechtig’s methodology, given the means by which LaPierre and his organisation have manipulated the right of the American population (including felons, terrorists and violent re-offenders) to bear as many arms as they can find room for.

Under the Gun exists for those that do not have the network of Washington swamp dwellers who call LaPierre ‘friend’ or ‘contributor’. It is a film to inspire anger and incite change and emerges as one of the best of its kind. 

*The producers acknowledged that an early version of the film did feature one sequence edited to imply pro-gun advocates struggled with one line of enquiry.

Help take action against gun violence by visiting a member of the Under the Gun partnership network: