Daily Inspiration Quote by Jessica Savitch

A single sentence, and Savitch strips the romance out of a word Americans love to mythologize. “Shootouts” gets treated like a Western set piece: two sides, equal footing, a rough code. She snaps that fantasy in half. By calling them “not gunfights of honor,” she’s targeting the cultural script that turns public violence into a story about bravery, skill, and deserved outcomes. Honor is the alibi that lets audiences watch carnage without confronting what it actually is.

Then she replaces the myth with two uglier, more contemporary frames: “gang wars” and “racial riots.” That move isn’t just rhetorical escalation; it’s a demand for accurate genre. If you label it a duel, you get individual villains and heroes. If you label it a gang war, you have networks, economics, policing, and retaliation. If you label it a racial riot, you have power, segregation, and institutions that can’t be shrugged off as “bad apples.” Savitch is warning that the vocabulary we choose decides whether we see structural crisis or cinematic spectacle.

Coming from a journalist in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the line lands inside a media ecosystem increasingly built around dramatic visuals and quick moral sorting. Savitch’s intent reads like a rebuke to both newsroom packaging and audience appetite: stop narrating bullets as entertainment, stop laundering chaos through cowboy myth, and admit what’s happening in the street is political, communal, and combustible.