A Study Of American Gun Culture By Analyzing Linguistic Features Of Bowling For Columbine

The United States has the largest number of guns in private hands than any other country in the world. According to a statistics of2010, there are roughly300million firearms owned by civilians in the United States, which has become a major cause for many social problems, including some notorious tragidies. Why is there such a large gun stock in the United States? Why is there so much gun violence in the United States? What are the obstacles in controlling guns in the United States? Scholars, especially in the U.S. have done many researches on American gun culture, trying to answer the questions, yet few of the previous researches are in the linguistic perspectives.Bowling for Columbine, a documentary about a school shooting in the United States in1999, winning numerous international awards, is the best target text for the analysis of the American gun cutlure from the lingusitic perspective.With the critical discourse analysis as the theoretical framework, specifically using Faireclough's Three-dimensional Model, the screenplay of Bowling for Columbine is analyzed in three steps:description, interpretation and explanation. In description, linguistic and structural features are analyzed. In interpretation, social context and the relationship between text and interaction are examined. The last step is to explain the interpretation results and to conclude features of American gun culture.The findings from the analysis are:such a large gun stock in the United States is a product of its political environment and legislations; easy accessibility to guns, using guns for self-protection and Americans'fear are three main reasons for so much gun violence in the United States; obstacles in controlling guns in the United States come from historical, political and social aspects, especially from interest groups.American gun culture has some special features:legally, possessing guns is a civil right given by the Constitution in the United States, though there are different restrictions from states to states; socially, more than a half of crimes are gun-related, and the death rate in a city and its gun possession are directly proportional; politically, gun policy is one of the most important factors in political elections in the United States.