When, earlier this year, Sons of Anarchy aired its fifth episode of its fifth season, entitled “Orca Shrugged,” I mostly wrote about motorcycle gang leader Jax Teller’s decisions, and Walton Goggins’ performance as a transgender prostitute who was enlisted in a blackmail scheme. But the most important scene is actually one that happens at the end of the episode.

One of the subplot of this recently concluded episode of Sons was a series of violent home invasions, blamed on an African-American gang, but in reality, the work of white Nomad members of the Sons of Anarchy, who had been recruited as part of a scheme by one faction of the club to destabilize the other. And in “Orca Shrugged,” the home invaders broke into the home of Charming, Calif. Sheriff Eli Roosevelt. Roosevelt and his wife Rita’s challenges getting pregnant had been a storyline earlier in the show, and by this season, she was pregnant. When the home invaders arrived, she was the only person home. She wasn’t expecting the Nomads to break into her house, of course. And the Nomads, as it turned out, weren’t expecting her to have a handgun in her home, loaded and easily available to her for personal protection.

In a lot of American popular culture, in that situation, Rita would have fought back bravely. Even in a dark, chaotic bedroom, she would have had chances to get off shots, and her bullets would have found their targets. Rita would have been survived, and she would have become, in that moment, a Strong Female Character.

Instead, Rita was shot accidentally. She lost her child. And she died. This episode and the one that followed were a stark rebuke to the idea that having guns in, say, a movie theater in Aurora, or a classroom in Connecticut, would have been an effective defense against a determined killer wearing body armor using a weapon capable of shooting many people quickly. In chaos in the dark, another gun is a multiplier of the potential for violence, a tool that depends on calm, time, good light, and a clear line of sight to be reasonably accurate. I’m so grateful to Sons of Anarchy for making that painfully clear, and acting as a counter to the tropes that suggest any of us can pick up a gun, defend ourselves, and become heroes.

I lived the first seven years of my life within fifty miles of Newtown, Connecticut, where today two gunman killed at least 18 elementary school children and a number of adults. I’ve shot guns, owned by exceedingly careful and responsible adults in my family, which I mention in case anyone has the temerity to suggest that I’m a naive liberal with no experience with guns after they read what I’m about to say.

But I really want someone who advocates against gun control to balance the scales for me, to go ahead and try to explain to me why the inconvenience suffered by gun owners and prospective gun owners under much tighter restrictions on the purchase of guns and ammunition outweighs the death of children in their classrooms, a place where they’re not just supposed to be safe, but to thrive. Explain to me why their suffering is worse than that of the people who died, and lost family members, in the rampage at Aurora, Colorado, where they were drawn to a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises out of enthusiasm, because it’s a time when parents with infants can see a movie and trust that they’ll sleep through the screening. Please, balance out for me, the loss of Gabby Giffords’ potential with impatience at a waiting period, or frustration at not being able to fire a certain number of bullets per minute. Because this is the choice we make, every time. And I’m terrified to watch us make it again.

The bridge is yours.

-Is “endowment” a dirty word?

-HBO on PTSD.

-I really hope that these winners of the Writers Guild Of America, West diversity program get their work into production.

-Hollywood’s dumbest apocalypses.

-Amy Poehler and Tina Fey 4 Ever:

I hadn’t read World War Z by the time the trailer for the Brad Pitt-Mireille Enos movie came out, but after I finished it this morning, it was clear what a travesty this adaptation seems poised to be. It would be impossible to adapt the oral history as a single, coherent narrative. But the book seems like it would lend itself to a miniseries that could float between different perspectives, or perhaps even more fittingly, a series of movies like the Red Riding trilogy, which explored the long-running investigation into a Yorkshire serial killer. Here are the six sections of World War Z that struck me as the most likely candidates for stand-alone films:

Section: Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Director: Stephen Chow
Why It Would Be Great: An otaku and a blind gardener take Japan back from the zombies? It would be one of the greatest genre mashups since Kung Fu Hustle, not to mention a pair of fantastic roles for Asian men. And while Chow is from Hong Kong, rather than Japan, his touch with Hustle was absolutely delightful. I’d love to see him have a shot at pitting two unlikely heroes against a mob of incredibly scary antagonists, and to pair it with some gorgeous landscape cinematography.

Section: Todd Wainio
Director: Ed Zwick
Why It Would Be Great: As he proved in Glory, the man can do a battle sequence. And it would be exciting to see a filmmaker with his kind of conscience take on the utter failure of the American military, and its attempt to recover from it, strategically and psychologically, and to turn the tide. Also, if Nicholas Brody’s going to get killed in the finale of Homeland this weekend, Damian Lewis is going to have some time on his hands. I’d love to see him take on this soldier’s role, particularly for the chance to see him get paired up with an honest-to-God, badass battle nun, who is Wainio’s partner in the reformed military.

Section: Admiral Xu Zhicai
Director: Shawn Ryan
Why It Would Be Great: Last Resort may be toast, but Ryan was on to something interesting with his story about a submarine crew gone rogue after it was given orders to fire a nuclear weapon on Pakistan. I’d love to see him take a shot at capturing the story of a Chinese submarine crew who smuggled their families on board and created a survivable society on board their ship as they fled from the zombie apocalypse consuming their country. Instead of deciding not to fire their nuclear weapons, as is the case in Last Resort, this story ends with the agonizing choice to nuke a bunker full of hardline Chinese leadership. It’s a harrowing adventure, but a deeply creative one, and it would avoid some of the pitfalls Ryan ran into when he tried to build out not just a sub crew but the population of an island in his ABC show.

Section: Xolelwa Azania
Director: Connie Field
Why It Would Be Great: Field directed Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, the amazing documentary series about the end of apartheid. While most of the people I recommend to direct these movies are feature directors, it would be fascinating to see Field go fictional and tackle South Africa’s decision to implement the Redeker Plan, an effort to save a core of South Africa by abandoning some of the population and the country’s land to the zombie infestation. As a story about racial reconciliation despite the echoes of apartheid in the plan, this could be a fascinating, subtle movie.

Section: Christina Eliopolis
Director: Patty Jenkins
Why It Would Be Great: This story of an Air Force pilot bailed out in the middle of infested zombie territory, staying alive with a voice on the radio as her only guide, could be an incredible showcase for a young female action star, maybe Gina Carano. And Jenkins knows a thing or two about directing a woman under extreme duress. This could be a simple, stripped-down, incredibly scary movie that wouldn’t even need to showcase a lot of zombies to be terrifying.

Section: Breckinridge Scott
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why It Would Be Great: In Contagion, Soderbergh featured a repellant blogger, played by Jude Law, who spread the news of a false cure for a global pandemic, and was later found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company which hoped to spike sales of herbal remedies. I’d love to see him put this kind of scenario at the center of a film, instead of addressing it as one of many threads in a single movie. He’d have so much fun tearing into a figure like Scott, and portraying the luxury he lives in as a kind of suffocating rot.

I was out of the town for the critics’ screenings of The Hobbit, which I’ll try to catch over the Christmas break. But I really appreciated this essay about Ali Arikan that’s half review of the movie, and half a meditation on a contradiction inherent in the film, and in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy as well. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote work that was incredibly nostalgic for the past, but it’s taken modern technology to put them on the big screen:

The reverence for a supposed golden age ruined by progress is a recurring theme in human history. The Romans had it, no doubt the guys before the Romans had it too. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose children’s story The Hobbit has now been adapted to the screen as a trilogy by Peter Jackson, also subscribed to this philosophy, along with his contemporaries, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. As the twentieth century progressed, Tolkien would be embraced by the alternative society as a sort of prophet of doom, accurately predicting the harrowing bleakness wrought by modernity.

To this day our hemp-wearing chums will knowingly roll their eyes and talk—at length—about Tolkien’s prophetic abilities (in theme, at least). Machines ravaged the earth only a handful of years after he wrote The Hobbit, in the carnage of the Second World War, they pronounce. But machines are operated by people. Human cruelty can be catalogued as far back in history as you want to go. The twentieth century has no exclusive rights on the charnel house.

And, most tellingly, neither of Tolkien’s books that have now been adapted into live-action features, The Hobbit or its cinematic precursor The Lord of the Rings, would have been possible without advancements in film production. Both were turned into feature animations of varying success in the 1970s, and John Boorman had long planned bringing the latter to the screen in the same decade, but it was technological progress that allowed Peter Jackson, et al to successfully tackle such densely—and idiosyncratically—crafted works of fantasy. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a rousing success, hugely popular with both audiences and critics, garnering billions of dollars at the box office, with the final film, 2003’s The Return of the King, sweeping the Oscars. Jackson and his films put the fantasy genre on film culture’s map.

This is one of the reasons I’ve always appreciated A Song of Ice and Fire—it’s fantasy that acknowledges that, while feudal society offered opportunities for glory and luxury to an extremely tiny minority, the standard of living was dramatically lower for almost everyone else, and even those privileged few were vulnerable to disease, death in childbirth, martial rape, death in battle, among other maladies. Tolkien wasn’t wrong that the process of moving into modernity can be wrenching, and the movie’s depictions of, say, Saruman’s deforestation of the area around Isengard, capture those sacrifices. But it’s a world where the only thing that comes out of industrialization is orcs, not, say, penicillin.