I'm just in my feels and rambling so take this with a grain of salt, but this awesome post about Cap Bucky sort of made me think about mcu Steve, and his own general lack of firearms.
When he first joins the Avengers, he's given his garish little outfit, the cowl, the bright red gloves and boots, and his signature shield of course, because that's what people recognize him by. Everybody else in the group has some kind of weapon (Nat's got her guns and probably a stash of knives, Clint's got his arrows, Tony can shoot laser blast thingies with his suit, and so on), but Steve's only given the shield. Which, I get it, he can absolutely use it to attack as well as to protect himself - but that's not quite the same, is it?
And I mean, this guy fought in actual WWII, he was on the front lines for close to two years! He's no stranger to guns,
he was storming HYDRA bases and blowing up buildings and tanks, with nazi soldiers still inside them, for god's sake!
And he looked pretty smug about it, too:
I mean, he's not actively looking for people to kill, and it's not like he immediately goes for the kill when he fights (he seems to tend more towards incapacitating first, though it depends on the situation), but the thing is, he is willing to kill if need be.
BUT. But it's like they just don't want people to see him with a gun in his hand. Definitely not when he's fighting aliens on national tv, and apparently neither is he issued any firearms when he's going on secret spy missions for SHIELD, either - not that I remember anyway, but obviously I could be wrong.
I'm just. Just thinking about Steve, especially during his first year or so in the 21st century, realizing more and more how his image has been twisted to serve whatever purpose was more convenient at the time, and how it's being twisted even further now that he's back.
There's this undeniable, concerted effort being poured into making him more palatable to the public.
They want him polished. They want him as an ideal to sell. They want Captain America the war hero, but he can't be directly associated with violence or with the brutal, blood-soaked, dirty-handed reality of war; so he's a soldier who fought in the war, but somehow he's never killed anyone (such a preposterous idea! Captain America? Kill someone? Perish the thought!), and the war itself is a vague, distant kind of war that belongs in the past, or possibly, occasionally, in a Hollywood movie that will gloss over the worst parts of it.
They don't want Steve the war veteran who's plagued by a severe case of survivor's guilt (not to mention all the other glaring PTSD symptoms). They want to sell Cap the goody-two-shoes who spends his time helping doddery old grannies cross the street, Cap the pedantic good little soldier who does cringe-worthy PSAs and Always Follows The Rules, and fights the bad guys in the Right Way because he's a Good Hero who Doesn't Enjoy Violence and has a strict no-killing policy, obviously.
So he can't be seen wielding a gun, because uhhh that would kinda ruin the vision they're going for here.
And I'm just picturing Steve sitting alone in his apartment, shield propped up against the couch by his feet, sipping a beer straight from the bottle and knowing, just knowing, how absolutely outraged Bucky would have been to know that they would send him out on the field to fight a bunch of aliens, without a single goddamn gun in his holster to give them hell with.
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