This is not a piece on gun control. I understand the Second Amendment. I understand the Tenth Amendment. I will not pretend to understand how these two interact. I will not pretend to understand individual county and state laws. It is too complicated and therefore should only be debated on by people who understand these laws.

This is not an essay on mental health care in this country. There are people who are mentally ill. People often die from their mental illnesses or commit acts that a person without a mental illness would not do. However, I took only four college courses on psychology and therefore do not consider myself an “expert” on the subject.

This is not an article on politics. That’s for the pundits. Whatever the hell a “pundit” is.

Instead, I write this because I’m exhausted. The “violence in the media” argument has been used so often, it’s cliche. In fact, so cliche that Amy Heckerling wrote one of the greatest responses to it back in 1995 for “Clueless”:

“Until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there’s no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value.”

It is not “glorified violence” in TV and movies that makes guns more appealing. We glorify survival. We glorify personal justice, pride, and revenge through popular media. That makes weapons more appealing to us, not violence in video games and movies.

The opening scene of the first episode of “The Walking Dead” depicts a cop shooting a little girl, who is a zombie. In the movie “Taken,” Liam Neeson’s character crosses international borders and commits murder to save his daughter’s life. In “Home Alone,” a child booby-traps his own house in an attempt to deliberately assault two home intruders. In the book and film “The Hunger Games,” children must both fight for their lives and and kill each other.

The theme throughout these shows and movies is that in the spirit of protecting your home, your life, and the life of your loved ones, we will go to great extremes. But these are works of fiction. However, instead of seeing them as entertainment, our society began to see them as handbooks. After “The Hunger Games” premiered, there was an increase in requests for archery classes. While it is a well respected world-wide sport, what was the reason? Should it be put on the same field as soccer and Little League as part of team building and exercise for children?

The zombie “trend” in popular culture spawned books and internet “how-to” guides to survive a zombie apocalypse. Zombies are not real. Aliens will not attack you. These creatures do not exist in the sense that are depicted. However, people take these threats seriously. They imitate movies and hone their skills and buy large knives. They stock up on supplies. And yet, they don’t know their neighbors. They don’t respect cops and see emergency personnel as a nuisance. Those distrustful of the system are inadvertently causing cracks in it.

People will buy guns for any number of reasons: Craftsmanship, sport, protection, intimidation. The same could be said for why people buy cars, which kill more people a year than guns according to the CDC. Yet the cultural landscape has one-upped the protection aspect. There are reality television programs and internet videos that show personal arsenals of self-described “Survivalists.”

The Survivialism movement isn’t new. We have seen bomb shelters and underground bunkers since the beginning of the Cold War. However, in recent years, (most notably since Y2K), movies and books have started to glorify it. People no longer want to be heroes that “save the day.” They want to be the heroes that “kick that threat in the face and make it suffer for the pain it caused or will inevitably cause their loved ones.”

So we sit around and brag about what we would do in “this hypothetical situation” or “If I was there, it wouldn’t have gone down like that.” We’d like to all think in a time of crisis and panic, we would be the ones who would stand up and take down the threat. However, people don’t realize that in the midst of mayhem, you have just enough success rate of taking down a mass murderer as you would if you stood up to a tornado.

There is a reason law enforcement condemn vigilantes. It’s not because they are “making the cops look bad.” It’s for the safety of the vigilante and those around them. Military and law enforcement officers are trained rigorously to recognize situations where it is better to intercede and when it is time to stay on the fringe. They are also trained to separate their emotions. In a real life emergency situation, there is no way to predict how one’s body will react. Adrenaline is a powerful biological element passed down through human evolution. However, it wasn’t passed down so we could ninja flip from one building to another. It was an evolutionary trait for when our ancestors came across lions and large snakes. Fight or flight. This was to protect the human species and eventually get us to the top of the food chain. And now that we are up there, the only things we have to fight are each other. Which we seem to always be itching to do.

There is an old joke where a cop stops a little old lady in her car and sees a shotgun in her lap. He then asks to see her registration and see an handgun in glove compartment. He next asks her to open the trunk and sees several more guns and rounds of ammunition. He goes, “Ma’am, why do you need these weapons?” “For protection,” she says, in her innocent old lady voice. “What are you afraid of?” asks the cop. The old lady cocks the shotgun and says, “Not a damn thing.”

Maybe we should be asking ourselves the same question.