“’No way to prevent this’ says only nation where this regularly happens.”

The above statement has more to say about gun violence and ownership in America than Javier Horjcajada’s compliation film From My Cold Dead Hands, which is a problem considering one is an Onion headline, and the other is a feature documentary. I have a deep disdain for gun ownership; I also have a disdain for condescension. In a contest between the two, who would win? Answer: uncertain.

The loser, however, was certainly I. At his Raindance Q&A, Horjcajada provided a loose thesis for From My Cold Dead Hands. “Americans like to talk about gun ownership in terms of good people owning guns and bad people owning guns, but they often forget about stupid people owning guns.” This hypothesis seems to guide the (mercifully only) sixty-four-minute run time. Clearly, Horjcajada scoured the depths of YouTube for videos of “stupid people owning guns.” It’s hard to suggest that the individuals depicted here don’t fall into that category. Watching clip after clip after clip of “stupid people owning guns” gets really tiresome really quick.

The problem with stupid people porn, or human zoo, or whatever you want to call it, is that it’s caustic, bitter and offers exactly zero solutions. Is the problem with guns in America a lack of gun education? Perhaps. What appears on screen, however, is an ethnographic depiction of a subculture so warped and twisted, it’s hard to see a path to change. How education could be a possibility is not something Horjcajada seems too interested in. In the meantime, here are more gun owners convincing themselves that they need assault rifles for the zombie apocalypse, convincing themselves they have a biblical provision to owning a machine gun. That’s the joke. It’s not very funny.