Wit & Attitude Quote by Shelley Duvall

Houston gets sketched here as a place where violence isn’t merely possible, it’s ambient - folded into the weather, the small talk, the local posture. Shelley Duvall’s line lands because it’s offhand, almost tossed over the shoulder, and that casualness is the point: the sentence performs the normalization it’s describing. “Everyone owns guns” is obviously an exaggeration, but it’s the kind of exaggeration people use when a culture feels total. The second clause, “and uses ’em,” moves from possession to practice, from identity to behavior; the gun isn’t a symbol in a drawer, it’s a habit.

Then she sharpens the blade with “sometimes just for the hell of it,” a phrase that collapses motive into mood. Not self-defense, not sport, not law-and-order mythology - just impulse, boredom, bravado. It’s a Southern colloquialism with a moral shrug built in, and it implicates a community ethos where discharge can be recreation and risk is someone else’s problem.

As an actress associated with a certain eccentric, wide-eyed American vulnerability, Duvall isn’t playing a policy analyst. She’s reporting a vibe, the way a performer might clock a set’s energy: what people joke about, what they treat as normal, what they assume you’ll understand without explanation. The intent reads less like anti-Texas scolding than a wary, darkly amused observation about a city where masculinity, freedom, and firepower blur - and where the punchline has consequences.