With the very obvious and notable exception of the Punisher, the vast majority of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters don’t have much use for guns. That’s completely understandable, too, when you’re dealing with super soldiers, giant green rage monsters, literal gods, teenagers that get bitten by radioactive spiders and more, but sometimes regular people get drawn into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest conflicts.
Of course, Hawkeye and Black Widow didn’t have any superpowers but still managed to get the job done without picking up an assault rifle, while Sam Wilson is a trained combat veteran who would much rather rely on his wings. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s John Walker is an altogether different proposition, though, given that he’d spent his entire adult life in the military before being thrust into the role of Captain America.
Up until the fourth episode of the show, he didn’t have any powers of his own, either, so it was only natural for him to make sure he was armed when heading into battle. And in a new interview, Wyatt Russell justified why Walker carries a gun everywhere he goes, even if he might not be needing it any more.
“Now it’s a different day and age where we fight existential wars. This is where this guy came from, we’re going to hit them before it happens. Is that the right thing to do? Is that the right way to go about it? It’s very difficult, people have different opinions. Lots of people have different opinions about the way it is now and our military is very different than it was. So this guy coming from a modern military background is going to be very different to Steve Rogers of old. And so it was almost like, ‘Well he’s got to have a gun. Are you not going to give me a gun? I’ve worked my entire career with a weapon. You have to give me a weapon’. So I thought they did a pretty good job of writing the line, ‘He’s not going to use it all the time, but he’s got one’.”
Fans may criticize the MCU’s new Captain America for wielding a firearm, but let’s not forget that The First Avenger showed that Steve Rogers’ very first mission in costume saw him fire a few shots, and he was already a super soldier by that point. Admittedly, anything Walker does is going to get blasted based on how much people hate the guy, but that just means Russell is doing a great job on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.