If “America’s storytellers” really want to change public perception of guns, they should consider being more honest on-screen about what bullets do to bodies. The issue isn’t really on-screen violence — it’s bloodless on-screen violence, the sort of violence in which guns fire and bodies simply fall to the ground in what could just as easily be sleep as death.

Journalist Jason Fagone in 2017 talked to trauma surgeons who deal with the reality of gun violence — mangled limbs, severed arteries, invasive and repeated surgeries — as well as victims. And that reality is sometimes simultaneously surreally and banally gruesome.

One man shot in the abdomen, Fagone wrote, “spent the next 11 months in the hospital, immobilized in bed, with an open wound down the front of him that had the circumference of a basketball. It got to the point where it was a normal thing for him to look down and think, oh, those are my intestines, there they are.”

Realistic violence in movies is often jarring when we see it because we see it so rarely.