'The question we should be asking is not whether Call of Duty, or Dexter, or the Saw films are going to turn us into a nation of multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-generational psychopaths, unable to or disinterested in distinguishing reality from the images we see on all kinds of screens. Violent culture has existed for years, and yet, the murderers in the mass shootings that appear to be descending on us at an escalating rate, are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Rather, it’s why so many of us, even those who will never put a rifle stock to our shoulders or wrap our hands around a pistol grip, feel so drawn to violent fantasies in our culture. Pretending that such an attraction came to life somewhere in a massively multiplayer online game is self-deluding. And acting as if shutting down the production of violent images would curb our fears and desires to fight back against them is an attempt to avoid confronting how frightening our society is for so many citizens even on ordinary days.'
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Why Banning Violent Video Games Won’t Address Our Culture of Violence
After Adam Lanza shot twenty young children and six of the teachers and administrators who helped educate them in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, the massacre renewed the long-dormant national debate …
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Have these people read some of the more violent Grimm's Fairy Tales? You can't stop ideas. You can regulate deadly weapons of mass destruction.
Precisely correct. First of all, restriction of ideas is undemocratic by its nature. Secondly, it's always been ineffective.
Violence in the media is both a symptom of a violent culture, it's an instigator less in spurring more violence and more in that it creates an tacit acceptance for that violence. It doesn't make us do it, but it makes us accept it. Why? Because in these cases, the emphasis is on the violence itself. We need to place more emphasis on the horror that is the aftermath of violence if we want to burn a desire to reduce violence into the psychology of the society.
The better idea is to figure out how to present these ideas in a way that increases their gravity (rather than trivializing them), as well as providing alternate types of ideas to entertain. As in all things, variety and moderation are key.
I am aways amused that Politicians always go after TV, Movies and Video Games (or back in the day, D&D), but never any of the following:
Hockey
Lacrosse
Football
Boxing
Ultimate Fighting
All of the Martial Arts.
Fencing.
All violent sports, in a very violent culture, but for some odd reason they are NEVER in the blame circle.