On the Count of Three.
So I was going to talk about how I liked this movie because of how it caused me to think about gun violence through the lens of mental health, but then I learned that that’s sort of a Republican take on gun violence, and I’m not a Republican.
There was a shooting in Atlanta a couple of days ago, like in the middle of the city, and the guy who was shooting people, his family said, had been struggling to do simple things like eat and get out of bed since he’d come back from working in the Coast Guard. His sister said he’d gone to the medical center for help and then—
Initially, I thought about how there are shootings in Atlanta all the time, but how because this wasn’t Black-on-Black violence, it was treated differently, more seriously, as an emergency. I think I felt a little irked by that, how different lives at risk provoke different responses, but now I can see how if the issue of gun violence is solved, it would be better for everyone, even the lives the country has never tried to protect with this sort of urgency.
I thought, Gun violence happens all the time. I thought, Why are we acting like this is brand new? But yesterday, there was a mass shooting in a Texas mall 10 minutes from where my sister lives with her husband and kids. I think then I realized how quickly something abstract can become personal, can affect you in a way that makes you desperate, urgent. What if she had been at that mall? What if the shooter had been in her neighborhood?
I’m scared, honestly. Everyone’s scared. I went on a walk in my neighborhood in Atlanta, which is near Emory, which means it’s mostly White, and people kept side-eying me as I walked behind them, and I kept feeling like any car that drove by could have a driver who rolled down the window and shot me just because.
It used to be paranoia that made me think like that, and how scary it is that now it’s logical, that now, when random violence happens all the time, it makes sense to expect it anywhere.
It is a very difficult place to be: tense, afraid, on edge. I don’t really know how to write about it.
On the Count of Three was good to me because it was the first movie I’d seen in a while where you could see where the person holding the gun was coming from. You could see the desperation, but the problem is definitely more the gun than the mental state, and the mental state is not always (apparently rarely) mental illness, but something different, something else. A need, maybe, to feel in control somehow, no matter the consequences.
I want to know why people walk up and shoot people they don’t know (or people they do know, or people they love), and how—alongside gun control—we lower the number of people who get to that place.
Image: Hulu
Note: While I liked On the Count of Three, the message of the film is kind of complicated. I don’t think it’s intended for people who are suicidal, as it doesn’t leave much room for a way through.
On the Atlanta shooting: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/us/atlanta-shooting.html
On the Texas shooting: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/06/us/allen-mall-texas-shooting.html
