John Wayne was a big star when I was a kid, too...but he never “inspired” me to shoot anyone. It’s not the guns, it’s demented people who long to shoot people.
Fast forward to today’s “Hollywood”...these slash movies just can’t show enough blood and guts. In John Wayne’s movies you seldom saw any hint of blood. We knew it was fake, and we knew it was just a movie.
But, we had parents that taught us right from wrong.
John Wayne was a hero not because he occasionally shot someone, but because he didn’t take any crap from the bad guys, and he was a patriot. His job was acting, reading someone’s script.
I guess, perhaps, we weren’t raised to be robots of the left, when schools taught the three ‘R’s” and patriotism, instead of communist indoctrination.
The first use of fake blood squibs was in the 1969 movie, “The Wild Bunch.” That’s why pre-1969 movies now look so fake in shooting scenes. That said, this writer is an idiot.