On the windy bluffs of Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr regard one another coldly. In awful synchrony, the pair raise their flintlock pistols, each one squinting down the barrel. Two sharp reports, and Hamilton collapses to the earth. His adversary walks shakily away, clinging to a bloodstained moral superiority.In a flickering cinematic image of another time, a lawman steps out into the dusty main street of a western town. He’s the only man with courage to face down the desperado standing before him. The outlaw goes for his gun, but the white-hatted sheriff is faster. The man in black slowly and bloodlessly slumps to the earth.

It’s one of our most persistent national myths: the duel. Two men face off with deadly weapons. The one still standing proves himself morally superior.

The late theologian Walter Wink famously chided our culture for our “myth of redemptive violence.” It is “the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favor those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favor of the gods.”

“In quick succession, the raw, unedited smartphone videos gave America something Hollywood has never shown us: a man’s actual death by gunshot.”

This cherished belief has found recent expression in the words of Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Beneath the smug political slogan shimmers our enduring national myth: the gun’s might makes right.

Until the week of July 4th. That week, the trial-by-combat myth began to unravel in the popular imagination. In the Baton Rouge video, the good guy with a gun fires round after round into the chest of Alton Sterling, an adversary who’s pinned to the ground. In St. Paul, the jittery good guy with a gun, a rising tone of panic in his voice, stubbornly points his weapon at Philando Castile, a man slumped in a car seat who’s clearly not long for this world. In Dallas, the good guys forsake their guns entirely, sending a whirring bomb-disposal robot to reverse its usual mission and blow up the bad guy in a kamikaze attack.

Viral social-media videos thrust the Baton Rouge and St. Paul images into the consciousness of millions. In quick succession, the raw, unedited smartphone videos gave America something Hollywood has never shown us: a man’s actual death by gunshot.

It wasn’t epic. It wasn’t honorable. It was simply horrifying. Far more shocking than even the exploding fake-blood packets of a Quentin Tarantino film.

Hollywood’s cinematic carnage is carefully scripted. The peculiar horror of Diamond Reynolds’ smartphone video, capturing the wheezing final breaths of Philando Castile, was that it was not scripted at all.