Well, yes, another shooting in a school today.
A bit awkward for the NRA to be meeting in the White House with the Vice President and have the meeting interrupted by news of another school shooting.
But let's talk about movies. And how they incite violence.
Wayne LaPierre recently was talking about the violent media culture, citing films from two decades ago as examples. (Well, he's old, he might not have seen the Bourne movies.) And the relation between media violence and real violence goes back a long ways. Hell, Tom Sawyer talks about making a gang after reading about such stuff in books. The Payne Fund studies of the 1930s attempted to show a causal relation, but those studies were clearly biased in their methodology, often ignoring evidence that showed a more complex dynamic between moviegoing and criminal activity in favor of evidence showing more direct cause-effect.
Is it possible to see a rise in crime due to increased exposure to violent films? Yes it is. And I'm sure more than a few killers have hoped they could make the 6 o'clock news by their actions. Copycat crimes are real, too.
But there's an interesting point that needs to be made. Most liberal democracies consume the same film and media culture as America. The most popular Hollywood films worldwide are the action films, since you don't really need to understand the dialogue to understand what's going on. (Sure, Woody Allen's films make more money in Europe than in the States, but he's certainly not breaking records like the standard blockbuster fare.) Videogames are enormously popular all over. The Dutch buy more violent games than Americans do. But what do these other democracies have that America does not? Clear, strict gun laws. What else do they not have? Tens of thousands of people being killed by guns every year.
The argument made after the Aurora shooting was: had people come to the theater with guns, they would have been able to stop this madman. Really? Do you really think you're going to play at action hero? You think you can see a lunatic armed to the teeth and protected likewise with body armor slam into your theater and open fire, and suddenly you're gonna become Bruce Willis in Die Hard? Fun film, great action...and totally unbelievable. It's a movie. Talk about getting movie violence confused with the real thing.
It's time we talk about the real thing. Real guns are killing real people.
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