I mean Travis didn't force him to buy a gun from him, but it's Darryl who chose to have that lifestyle. Darryl decided to drop out from high school and become a gangster. So it was his fault 100%. Why blame Travis for his death if Darryl chose to have that lifestyle?
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I am glad we agree on that.
shareYes, but Travis is the man who provided it, so he bears the same responsibility. It takes two to tango: one to sell, one to buy.
I mean, really, how many times will you look under Jabba's manboobs?
Of course. But he didn't force him to buy the gun. Darryl chose to have that lifestyle. Big difference.
shareThe more I think about it, the more I realize it isn't about making Darryl into a blameless victim. The film acknowledges that Darryl made his choice, did something dumb and got himself killed. Riggs is pretty adamant about this. After Darryl's death, the issue becomes the disturbing ease with which a boy his age gets ahold of a military-grade machine pistol.
Darryl and the gangster culture he and his friends are enamored with is only one side of the problem. They're the demand. People like Travis are the supply. Short of a radical cultural shift in black youth (and let's be honest here, that's a tall order), there's no way to effectively eliminate the demand completely, we can only try our level best to prevent the demand from being met by eliminating the supply, which means going after Tyrone and eventually Travis.
Plus, at the time the story switches to "get Travis" mode, Darryl is already dead and there's no bringing him back. He and kids like him will always want guns because they think they're cool. Busting up Travis' shifty construction project and the arms dealing ring that's funding it isn't about taking blame away from those kids, it's about preventing them from getting the guns they want so they won't hurt people (or themselves).
Mind you, just so we're on the same page, I'm not trying to turn this into a gun control issue (wishy-washy liberal though I can sometimes be), and neither was the movie; that's why Travis is emphatically an illegal arms supplier and not running a gun store on the corner. Like the movie, I'm making a big distinction between your garden variety handgun and something like a MAC-10. That Darryl would've settled for a more conventional gun like a Colt or S&W pistol is a point I will concede beforehand, but it's worth pointing out that the issue worth worrying about in the movie is not only the fact Darryl had a gun in the first place, but the kind of gun he had.
I mean, really, how many times will you look under Jabba's manboobs?