RCS Spanish Professor Scott Boehm and Peter Johnston (Film Studies), were awarded a Large-scale Development Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP) grant to film the new feature-length documentary Our Knotted Gun. The film takes the mass shooting at MSU on February 13, 2023 as its entry point for an exploration of the uniquely American epidemic of gun violence in all its complexity.

The filmmakers document a range of responses to the violence from a diverse set of people who have decided the American nightmare must come to an end. While Michigan serves as the main stage for the social drama, the story is national in scope and set within a multicultural, global framework. The filmmakers also investigate the intersecting factors that contribute to gun violence, including economic inequality and exploitation, structural racism and white supremacy, gender and domestic violence, a lack of access to health care and education, social isolation and exclusion and a long history of imperialism and militarization.

This information was adapted from the Our Knotted Gun Web site, where much more information is available.