PARK CITY, Utah — Gun violence can be an awkward subject at the Sundance Film Festival. Over the years, the event has helped popularize — some would say glamorize — extreme gun imagery in movies; Quentin Tarantino was incubated and hatched here.

But this year Sundance programmers, with deep commitment to freedom of expression, and their selected filmmakers seem to be taking a position that real guns, not the movie kind, ought to be more tightly policed. At the very least, four major gun-themed films having their world premieres at the festival, which begins here on Thursday, want to amplify the debate on firearms in America.

“For me, it’s just not O.K. for us as a country to have decided that this carnage is the price of doing business,” said AJ Schnack, the director of “Speaking Is Difficult,” a documentary short that begins with the recent mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and ends with a plea for gun control. The Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour”) is one of the film’s executive producers.

Sundance will also give a megaphone to Tim Sutton, who wrote and directed “Dark Night,” a drama inspired by the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre in 2012, and Kim A. Snyder, whose “Newtown” examines the continuing community trauma caused by the 2012 mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Part of Ms. Snyder’s harrowing documentary looks at how little has changed in regard to gun reform.