"American Gun" -- A Tumble into Fraudulence

My brother-in-law had a colleague in the U.S. Park Police who one night, mistaking her for an intruder, shot and killed his beloved child, his teenage daughter. He had grounded her but she had gone out on a date anyway, and on arriving back home she had come into the darkened house through a window.

This happened long ago, yet ever since, regularly I think of this incident. Those particular circumstances make it the all-time worst tragedy that I have ever heard of or that indeed is even conceivable to me when it comes to all the horrible things that can befall parents.

The one question that has kept hitting me over and over is how this man was able to live with that most hideous of tragedies. I couldn't see how it was possible.

The makers of the James Coburn 2002 vehicle, "American Gun," based their movie on an almost identical incident, and I can see how, in doing so, they would think that they had a big problem. They probably thought that, though ordinarily it would trump all other considerations, exploring how the badly stricken father managed to cope with what he had done offered too narrow a dramatic range to have much entertainment value. It would have made the movie too dark and dreary.

So they hit on the expedient of making the viewer believe through nearly the whole of the film that the daughter was killed by robbers in a shopping mall parking lot. They never gave the viewer any reason to suspect that something else was actually the case. Not till near the very end does the film reveal the true circumstances and identity of the daughter's actual killer -- the father himself, Coburn's character.

I guess this could be called "clever" plotting, and if viewers like me feel badly defrauded by that device, the makers could think that at least that would not happen till there wouldn't be enough time left for it to matter much, and so what if that would destroy all repeat viewing? Meanwhile in this way they could ignore the ramifications of parents shooting at shadows, and the bulk of the movie could be safely framed in what, had the real circumstances been known from the start, would have been seen as totally trivial, just as, following the real life shooting that I mentioned, not once did the gun that the man used ever take up any of my thoughts. Not ever!

This film, however, mainly shows how the Coburn character goes about uncovering the past history of the employed gun. That history turns out to be tragic, though in today's world, how the movie makers could have thought that that would be surprising or enlightening for anyone isn't clear.

The only attempt to explain the father's questionable quickness to fire down his stairs at an unidentified target consists of flashbacks to one of his experiences in World War II. His slowness to shoot a very young German soldier gave that boy time to kill the father's best buddy.

Thus the movie's message seems to be that the father, years later, is in no way to be held accountable for his ultimate misdeed.

His lines clearly express that attitude. When the Coburn character is asked why he is so interested in the history of that gun, he never says, "This gun was used to kill my daughter." Instead he always says, "This gun killed my daughter."

Therefore he himself is not to be held responsible for having stolen the gun in the first place, if only from the purse of his wayward granddaughter, or for picking the gun up later or for aiming it directly at his child, the mother of that granddaughter, or for pulling the trigger. The American gun itself did all that.

I'm not a supporter of the gun lobby, and I know that precision in speaking is not an outstanding trait of movies, but I thought that those lines only subtracted all the more from the integrity of this film.