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In April 1996, a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The perpetrator is the subject of Nitram, the fine new film by Justin Kurzel, featuring a phenomenally creepy performance by Caleb Landry Jones that netted him the Best Actor award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The very existence of Kurzel’s film has been been condemned by some Australians, for whom the pain is still raw, but for viewers in the northern hemisphere the most alarming moment in the film is the ease with which a clearly disturbed young man is able to buy guns.

Twelve days after Port Arthur, the Australian government pushed through sweeping gun control laws, just as the UK tightened theirs after the Dunblane Primary School massacre that same year, and in both cases the restrictions seem to have worked. Not being of the hunting and shooting persuasion, I have seen a gazillion guns on film but never laid eyes on one in real life; to people like me, firearms are as alien as the laser beams and light sabres of science fiction. Since 1996, gun deaths in Britain and Australia have been so mercifully rare they can still command shocked headlines.

Yet in America such slaughter has become so routine that it only makes a blip on the radar if the body count is too awful to be ignored. When, in May, an eighteen-year-old with a high-powered rifle killed 21 pupils and teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas, it was the 212th mass shooting in the US this year.

While politicians blame everything but lax gun laws for the carnage, a consortium of filmmakers and actors (including JJ Abrams, Judd Apatow and Julianne Moore) recently signed an open letter urging their peers to reconsider the way guns were depicted on screen, apparently in response to accusations that “Hollywood’s love of guns increases the risk of shootings” (google those words and you get about two and a half million hits), ignoring the fact that every other country in the world is exposed to the same violent movies and video games without racking up insane levels of gun death in everyday life.

But maybe there are questions for Hollywood to address. The fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of a western in October last year, following Alec Baldwin’s accidental discharge of a gun he’d been told wasn’t loaded, suggests such weapons are not taken as seriously as they should be, even in situations overseen by experts whose only job is to ensure their safe use. It seems nothing has been learnt since the .44 Magnum cock-up that resulted in the death of Brandon Lee during filming of The Crow in 1993.

Explicit scenes are often condemned, but maybe film violence isn’t explicit enough?

From a non-Australian point of view, what is most remarkable about Nitram is its restraint. Although never less than troubling to watch, the film keeps the physical violence offscreen. Whether this was an aesthetic choice, or a token of respect for victims and families, or simply a way of avoiding sensationalism, it taps into the age-old dilemma of screen violence: to show or not to show what happens when someone gets shot.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code frowned on realistic bloodletting. Characters who were shot would simply clutch their chests and fall over, like kids in the playground.

But it must have been harder to preach discretion once the public had seen Abraham Zapruder’s footage of President Kennedy having his brains blown out in 1963, and the graphic violence of Europe’s spaghetti westerns helped usher in a new era in American filmmaking. It’s all fun and games and jolly banjo music until Bonnie and Clyde (1967) shoot a bank manager in the face and get shredded by 130 bullets. When The Wild Bunch (1969) ended with its anti-heroes felled in a slow-motion welter of exploding blood squibs, John Wayne complained that it destroyed the myth of the Old West. But maybe the myth that bullets killed only villains, and bloodlessly at that, needed to be bust wide open. Gangsters and gunslingers would henceforth be mown down in ways more operatic than realistic, though at least the frailty of human flesh was finally being acknowledged.

It’s explicit scenes like these that are often condemned by the guardians of public morality, but might it not be the case that film violence isn’t explicit enough? The gore-is-more approach is surely more ethical than the blockbuster convention of showing action heroes like Jason Bourne or Fast & Furious’s Dominic Toretto shrugging off gunshot wounds that would fell lesser mortals, or at least shatter their bones, after which they carry on running or fighting as if nothing has happened. Meanwhile, a paediatrician faced with victims of the Uvalde massacre described the bodies as “pulverised”, “decapitated” and “ripped apart”, obliging parents to identify their children by shoes, or DNA. In the light of American lawmakers’ refusal to place any restrictions at all on the purchase of weapons of mass destruction, maybe it’s up to Hollywood to start showing visual evidence of what an AR-15 can do to a ten-year old child.

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist and photographer