Sorry, Marcia, but my recollection is exactly the opposite. The gore, as far as I can see, has increased in recent years, along with other more explicit portrayals of violence and sex. The "old time" portrayal was distinctly and literally bloodless: People fell neatly to the ground, we might've seen a few nice neat bullet holes in their clothing (bullet holes that oddly never bled), perhaps there was a little melodramatic twitching, but for all we could tell, it was heart failure that killed people who'd been shot, never the bullets themselves.

In other words, in the movies, guns really didn't kill people, and death was just an unfortunate side-effect of taking a bullet.

Remember Bonnie and Clyde</>? They were riddled with hundreds of bullets in the final ambush, yet as always in the movies, their bodies were essentially undamaged, except for a pattern of fake holes that looked no more serious than acne. No splattered brains and spilling guts for Hollywood.

Which, I have to say, makes Hollywood as complicit as the NRA in making gun violence acceptable in America.