At last, the end has come _ the world’s end, if you care to know. Funeral pyres are being lit across the nation in mourning, while improvised newspaper captain’s hats drift across kiddie pools like Viking death ships loosed across the seas; the reign of Captain Jack Sparrow is over at last. Let us grieve.

But! Even after the "Pirates of the Caribbean" makes dock in the Land of Far Far Away, the summertime sumo giants of the cinematic world are still coming out swinging.

While warring casino gangs square off against a team of average Joes tossed into every comic book fanatic’s wet dream, a patch in the garden of summer cinema that flowered in recent summers remains bare: documentaries.

Most of the American public was recently introduced by "March of the Penguins" and "An Inconvenient Truth" to the only genre where small animals and political scare tactics can blend surprisingly well with one another.

However, the genre has revealed its tendency to bolt when flushed out of the indie festivals and into the open. That’s a shame, since heart-melting baby birds and ice-melting temperatures have proved effective lures to bait those 85 percent of us who feel that hating George Bush is as much as we need to know about "the issues."

What would the next infamous summer documentary have been, had the bigwigs of politics or cinematography thrown their hats into the ring?

After all, looming elections make the time ripe for a world issue to come to the forefront _ world hunger, perhaps, or why there should be age limits on tank tops and shorts with words written on the back of them (because if the sight of your fingernails makes small children start looking around for a broomstick and a pail of water, then you’re nobody’s "Kitten").

Better yet, why not take on an issue that managed to hold the public eye for nearly a week during the VT shootings, which held the record up until the advent of Paris Hilton’s jailhouse blues?

Debuting in the summer of 2009, the imaginary gun-control documentary that promises to be filled with violence! Armageddon! Exclamation points! "Bang Bang You’re Dead: An American Comedy." Coming soon to a state legislature near you.

Should citizens be allowed to keep guns next to the waffle mix in their pantries? This is one of the issues brought recently to light that has elephants, giraffes and Democrats (yes, it’s still legal for you to cross out that last one and replace it with what logically follows _ that is, until Bush’s American Patriatonizer is up and running. You can tell that he named it himself, the clever boy) alike reaching for the .44 Magnums in their campaign arsenals.

Gun control is one of the few battlegrounds where it’s always been Opposite Day for the Blues and the Reds. For some reason, Republicans long ago decided that although abortion is Satan’s latest way of sticking it to the Big Man Upstairs, any amendment involving already-born bloodshed is all-clear in God’s books (because, as all Republicans know, America is a theocracy in denial).

On the other hand, Democrats used to be all in favor of everyone being able to say whatever the bleepity bleep they want _ as long as nobody has any firepower to back it up. And yet when the VT massacre’s roots were linked to a shoddy firearms background check, Democrats across the nation weren’t popping champagne bottles and sitting on office copiers with their pants around their ankles. Why?

Because at our heart, we are a country of rednecks. Yes we are, all of us _ yes, even you with the pocket protector who didn’t get his first kiss until the embarrassing age of 17. The United States is very in touch with its inner 30-year-old Southern man; we’ll wear a tie and suit for dinner to make our wives shut up, but after hours we like to toss on our 10-gallon hats and play a friendly game of cowboys-and-Indians with the neighbors. If the neighbors don’t happen to feel like playing, we firebomb their house until they get into the spirit of things; all in good fun.

Guns are to America what tea is to Britain; without them, we’d inevitably fall into the fetal position and suffer hallucinations of presidents who can both walk and talk without stumbling, sometimes even at the same time. Every nation has a foundation; every superhero has a lab accident or a nuclear explosion that makes him or her what he or she is. Britain became a superpower by taking over every country it could reach before asking what was in it. China, the pop star, gained fame for having the greatest number of people inside of it. The first Americans lived by shooting rats and anything else that was stupid enough to move; they built a nation out of gunpowder, ink and discontent.

And it worked. Guns work; that’s the truth that no one’s yet managed to slink around. Every game, every war only has one rule that matters: Whoever’s holding the biggest gun is the one who’s holding the greatest power over all the other players. The USA is shoving other countries around with bombs, not intellect; very rarely do Middle-

Eastern terrorists send a video over the Internet with the bone-quaking threat, "If you don’t declare us your superiors, we will kill you with our brains."

We like to think of ourselves as a species beyond violence, beyond carnal instinct; we like to lie to ourselves. But when the posturing fades and the morals and debating are washed away, we’re left to face the oldest truth: we are animals. Granted, we’re animals that have become extremely creative in coming up with ways to kill and control one another, but we’re still animals. Bags of flesh and muscle and organs; that’s all we are. Intellect won’t keep a 12-gauge shell from slicing your intestinal tract into sausage. The only true freedom lies in being able to protect yourself; all the "free speech" in the world means nothing if no blood is drawn. Death is the universal currency; when intellect and humanity are stripped away, only death remains, and the fear of it. Fear checks us; fear brings out the ape within.

Citizens need to be able to hold that fear. Guns are the one truth in keeping democracies from becoming dictatorships; if only the government is armed, what’s to stop them from doing whatever they please with the people? Do you really think protests and sit-ins mean anything without the possibility of revolt behind them? Alone, peaceful protest means nothing. There has to be a physical threat looming in the background; even the government bleeds when it’s bitten.

It’s true that a lack of gun laws can be abused, but so can cold medicine, or laxatives, or no limits on water consumption. Gun control, however, leads us toward a much icier slope; once we relinquish our right to arms, we give up all rights. Remember that without guns, each and every one of us is a punching bag at the mercy of those who have them; remember fear. Are you its master, or with one firearms ban could it master you?

Jessie Matus will be a junior at Oneonta High School this fall.