Someone has clocked the serious meaning behind the floating gun in Weapons

There are many major talking points in Weapons, but one of them is something that people have been analysing for weeks since the film came out because it stands out so much in the rest of the film. It’s not Aunt Gladys focussed, although there is a good theory that ties her to it. It’s not even about the hotdogs, which again has a really moving hidden meaning. It’s actually all to do with Archer’s surrealist dream – where he sees the huge, floating machine gun above his home with the 2:17 time all the kids vanished hanging underneath like an ammo count. Whilst many have interpreted the moment to be a bit of a red herring, there is actually a crazy specific detail that gives the floating gun in Weapons such more profound meaning than initially sussed.

This is such a specific detail 

The big floating gun in Weapons had a lot of people theorising it was to do with how video games are a scapegoat for violent crime – specifically for school shootings. A lot of people have been theorising that Weapons was a metaphor for school shootings in the US, but now someone has clocked how this detail has linked to something legal in the US that is way more profound than any of us clocked.

People thought it might just be a Jaws situation, quoting the classic theme of “maybe the shark in Jaws is just a shark” rather than standing for anything more meaningful. But one commenter on Reddit clocked that “There was a bill in 2022 that would have banned assault rifles. It passed the house with 217 votes but did not pass the senate.”

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This is actually true – in July 2022, the U.S. House passed H.R. 1808, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2022, with exactly 217 votes. The symbolic time seen all through Weapons is the exact number of votes the bill got.

That number isn’t a random detail slipped into the film. The image of a floating gun marked with 2:17 isn’t just some surreal flourish in Weapons, it’s a loaded political reference. It quietly calls back to a pivotal moment in recent American history, when a proposed “weapon” ban nearly passed but ultimately failed.

Seen through that lens, the movie takes on a new shape. It’s not only a story of vanished children, witches, and fractured timelines. It’s a meditation on grief, paralysis, and the real-world fallout of missed warnings. It asks us to consider the weapons in our hands, the ones we dismiss, and the ones we eventually become.

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