| Brow Beat When Hitchcock Pushed for Gun Control By James Hughes
Posted Wednesday, May 15, 2013, at 08:54 PM ET  Each news cycle is replete with Twilight Zone comparisons. With incessant surveillance, melting planets, and robot warfare consuming headlines, there's no shortage of potential comparisons. But following the recent wave of accidental shootings at the hands of children—culminating in the heart-wrenching story of a sibling fatality in south-central Kentucky from a gun marketed for children as "My First Rifle"—there's another classic TV show that applies to a chilling degree: Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The episode "Bang! Your Dead," which originally aired in 1961 and can be viewed in full online, tracks an afternoon of agonizing roulette. A young boy replaces the toy gun in his holster with the real revolver he finds in his uncle's suitcase, which he partially loads with live rounds. For a pulse-pounding afternoon, the boy waltzes around town, slipping through each townsperson's grip as he plays cowboy. "Stick 'em up!" he orders. Friends and neighbors all bashfully obey, teasing out the boy's joke—and the audience's horror. The episode, the last Hitchcock directed himself, opens with the trigger-happy boy ogling over the birthday present of a neighborhood trendsetter—a strikingly realistic six-shooter, complete with a "whole boxful" of bullets, which the boys loads into the revolving chamber with tongue-curl concentration. He then sizes up the chintzy hardware on the half-pint's hip. "What a cheesy gun," he sneers, crushing his admirer's hopes and prompting a search for a more convincing sidearm. I confess a certain familiarity with that ... To continue reading, click here.
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