THE sound of gunfire is fading from American television. Actors are balking at violent programmes as networks bow to parental pressure to create zones of “gun-free TV”.

Kristin Davis, formerly Charlotte in Sex and the City, and Jeri Ryan, best known as the alien Seven of Nine in the Star Trek spin-off Voyager, have been credited with starting a trend when their agents asked for gunplay to be toned down in their latest dramas, due to be shown in Britain later this year.

Last week, as America’s top networks began publicising their autumn schedules, Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, said he found it liberating to make dramas where characters “don’t have to be toting guns all the time”.

Campaigners are hoping handguns will follow smoking and drinking into TV oblivion. While characters on the big screen continue to light up, smoking has become rare on television.

Already NBC has erased many jokes about “getting wasted” in its remake of The Office. The traditional shoot ’em up had started to turn off viewers.

This week NYPD Blue, about New York police, ends a 12-year run as the share of cop dramas on the big five US networks falls to an all-time low of 15%.

Five years ago, one in four shows on American television was about police officers. But reality programming and a new generation of soap operas have driven many to extinction.

Survivors such as Law and Order increasingly concentrate on solving puzzles rather than shooting bad guys. Quentin Tarantino, who is directing a forthcoming episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has promised to make it “more about brains than blood”.

Even spy Kiefer Sutherland shoots fewer terrorists than usual in the latest series of real-time thriller 24.

Davis, 40, is leading the way with Soccer Moms, in which she plays a housewife turned private eye who refuses to carry a gun. “When she got the chance to make a statement about the prevalence of guns, she took it,” said a business associate.

Ryan, 37, has made a stand as a single mother against handguns.

“Living in Los Angeles, she knows how many children are killed by stray bullets,” said an executive at the CBS network, which is making Ryan’s new series The Commuters. “She feels handguns have been made too sexy in the past, and does not want to be part of that.”

About 40 new programmes will be unveiled in the next few weeks. Although clones of The X Files, Friends and Desperate Housewives will predominate, there is also a sprinkling of novelty cop shows such as American Crime, where a housewife turned law official pursues neighbours accused of parking on the wrong side of the street. She will not carry a firearm.

Liz Bishop-Goldsmith, who set up the pressure group Mothers Against Guns, welcomed the changes. “Most TV is garbage, and all these weapons are the worst,” she said. “Most parents will be glad to see them disappear from the living room.”

It could prove an expensive gamble for the networks. Executives are fretting about a growing cultural gap between Republican states, where gun ownership has risen since the September 11 attacks, and Democratic states where the proportion of people with fireams has fallen.

Television is largely made in states with strong gun control, such as California and New York, but watched for many more hours a week in places such as Florida.

In the end, ratings will decide whether television bosses bite the bullet and ban the gun.

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