There's a point I'm trying to make but I'm not sure how to connect my original post to what I'm trying to say in this one.
I read this in an NRA magazine, whichever one was focused specifically on the Second Amendment.
In the late fifties or mid sixties someone in Hollywood decided to make the Motion Picture Industry an agent for societal change.
That's when we started seeing episodes in which a character decides to try smoking and eventually decides it's not for him and that he's going to be his own man and not smoke.(Greg Brady)
The episode of Happy Days when Fonzie got glasses and proved wearing glasses can be cool.
They started introducing Gay and Trans characters on television shows.
And they started changing the way firearms were portrayed.
There never was a Private Citizen on Adam-12 who carried a firearm of any kind who wasn't incompetent or in violation of the law (The Buff/The Chaser). I don't remember the episode but the guy that ran out of his house with a hunting rifle and either shot somebody or shot at somebody and I think almost hit Reed.
According to the NRA there was even some committee in Hollywood that decided that going forward private citizens would never be shown as competent to handle firearms.
A common plot point became that somebody would try to burglarize the house. The head of the household bought a gun for self-defense and by the end of the show he would panic at almost kill one of his kids or his wife and decide that maybe he shouldn't have a gun in his house at all.
I said this before but even in the later seasons of Family Matters Carl Winslow was never shown wearing a duty belt or a gun. In Third Watch Colby Bell who played officer Ty Davis Jr was shown more than once getting home from work and unloading his duty gun and locking it up.
I'm not sure how to make the connection but I'm absolutely positive that when the writers have Abigail Baker emphasizing that a firearm was loaded it's part of the same thing.
The use of radio, films, literature, and television as a tool for societal change happened long before the time frame you're mentioning. Look up the Hays Code of 1930 and Hollywood's self-censorship.
The famous scene from
The Great Train Robbery where a gun is pointed directly at a camera was verboten under the Hays Code.
The Television Code was similarly adopted in 1951 and pretty much replicated the Hays Code. This was done because prior to 1951, the National Association of Broadcasters Code of Ethics for radio of 1935 was applied to television, but due to the difference in technology, the radio code really didn't work out.
Mass media is a very critical tool in the shaping and promotion of society. That's literally how propaganda works.
There was a change in Hollywood starting in the late 1950s. That change was that younger directors, actors, producers, etc. felt they were being smothered by the Hays Code and started to do more independent productions. There was a cultural revolution in Hollywood and a lot of it was telling the establishment to go fly a kite.
That led to a period from the 1960s to the early 2000s where a lot of great films were made. But since then, Hollywood has become what it was back in the 1940s and 1950s, a over-the-top controlled environment where no risk is taken with film and television.
The creative talent for story telling has shifted to video gaming. They take risk with plots, stories, characters, etc.
In video gaming, you see stories where the good guys are fighting tyranny or some criminal threat and they're using firearms in a way never depicted traditionally in film these days.
