Hollywood, Stop Making Violent Movies

[AmyNation]

Come on, you're smarter than this.

"Less" is not the same as "not". If my house is flooded with eight feet of water, and the water recedes to six feet, am I not still flooded?

Ok, so how do our larceny, burglary and sexual assault numbers compare with Canada?

Don't know. I'm still picking your last chart apart but again the topic is violence; larceny and burglary by themselves are not part of that. Still looking for a link to where that chart came from btw...

See post 60

 

[Dr Grump]

And I've watched hundreds of violent movies - as have many of my friends - yet none of us have ever been in trouble with the police or assaulted anyone.
People who commit violent acts are responsible for those acts. Nobody else.

Could it not be that the same stimulus affects different people in different ways?

Just sayin'. Because what you have here is a fallacy of inductive generalization.

Yes it is possible, but most normal human beings, very early on in life, know the difference between right and wrong. Those that might have a disorder - bipolar, schizophrenia, even Aspergers - might get a pass. But the rest of us? We make a choice...whether it be chemically enhanced by drugs or alcohol or just normal behaviour.

 

[mudwhistle]

Ok, so how do our larceny, burglary and sexual assault numbers compare with Canada?

Maybe you should compare the United States with a country that's not an ice-cube 8 months out of the year and has a comparable population density.

No, all you have to do is compare per 100,000 of population....

We come out on the low end when you do that. Around 4.8.

Russia has 10.2, North Korea 15.2, Venezuela 45.1.

I think it doesn't tell the full story when you throw out these statistics.

 

[Dr Grump]

RealClearPolicy - Assault and Homicide: U.S. vs. Canada

^chart source

Also, wiki said the same thing

WTF? Did you see the homicide graph? The US side does not include homicides by black or Hispanic people? Why don't they just cut out those with blond hair, or maybe left-handed people? Or those that like vanilla ice cream over chocolate?

 

[AmyNation]

NationMaster - Crime stats: Canada vs United States

Here's a few.

Canada has more assaults, and more rapes.

 

[Dr Grump]

Maybe you should compare the United States with a country that's not an ice-cube 8 months out of the year and has a comparable population density.

No, all you have to do is compare per 100,000 of population....

We come out on the low end when you do that. Around 4.8.

Russia has 10.2, North Korea 15.2, Venezuela 45.1.

I think it doesn't tell the full story when you throw out these statistics.

So your comparing a Western nation like the US against two third world countries and the Hermit Kingdom? Really?

 

[AmyNation]

RealClearPolicy - Assault and Homicide: U.S. vs. Canada

^chart source

Also, wiki said the same thing

WTF? Did you see the homicide graph? The US side does not include homicides by black or Hispanic people? Why don't they just cut out those with blond hair, or maybe left-handed people? Or those that like vanilla ice cream over chocolate?

I saw that, after it was pointed out.

However the wiki link I posted also shows that we are not far off Canada in murder, and again, with the steady decline we are in, in 10 years, I think we will have less murder overall.

 

[Toro]

There is no evidence that violent movies have much of an affect on crime. These movies are also widely played in countries which have dramatically different crime rates than the US.

FTR, I won't be seeing Tarantino's new film.

I think this post was extremely stupid.

Anyone who has ever taken psychology in college knows that we are all a product of our environment.

The Sandy Hook shooter played Call To Duty religiously. His mother taught him how to shoot the weapons he used. He had a mental condition. I can't prove that he watched violent movies but most of the films released last year contained gratuitous violence. You can see it every day on TV. I think without the constant exposure to visual gun violence he probably wouldn't have done what he did.

The Columbine shooters were into the same morbid crapola this kid was. Most countries don't have the television programming we have. As a matter of fact I've never seen the kind of crap anywhere else that we see every day here in America. I've lived in and visited dozens of countries and none of them even comes close to watching TV like we do. We are addicted to our televisions.

And I have traveled in many countries and lived in three, and I have seen this stuff outside of the United States. The rate of gun murder in Canada and the UK are many orders of magnitude lower than in the US, and all the shows and video games you see here you see in those countries.

Again, American movies and video games are widely distributed around the world. There is no empirical evidence linking these movies and video games with the rate of violence.

 

[Pogo]

Thanks Amy -- went by too fast the first time

Right next to it was this post, also didn't see at the time:

I suggested cutting the violence in movies.
I suggested cleaning up television programming.
I suggested putting up a fence around our schools.
I suggested placing armed guards at the gates.
I suggested background checks for anyone wanting to buy a military style weapon.
I suggested waiting periods.

The left thinks everything I've mentioned can be solved by going after gun owners.
I believe that going after gun owners will cause more trouble that they can imagine.

I'm afraid this is more projection. Not sure where you get the idea that anyone thinks "everything can be solved by going after gun owners". I don't.

On #s 1 and 2 I agree with you; 5 and 6 too.
On #s 3 and 4 -- if we have to live in a place where any of that is necessary, then we've already lost our claim to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And in any case that's running away from the problem -- taking a defensive, reactive stance against the symptom instead of addressing the disease pro-actively -- which is where you at least tried to start with #s 1 and 2. That was a good start. Follow it through.

I just don't think defensive/reactive solutions are solutions. That is after all what "gun control" amounts to. If God Herself were to come down and declare, "OK I've had it with this shit, no more gun sales, ever" --- would it stop gun violence? Of course not, because we're already loaded with them, and more to the point, we're voluntarily loaded. It ain't the fact that guns exist; it's that the fetish for them does.

 

[mudwhistle]

And I've watched hundreds of violent movies - as have many of my friends - yet none of us have ever been in trouble with the police or assaulted anyone.
People who commit violent acts are responsible for those acts. Nobody else.

Could it not be that the same stimulus affects different people in different ways?

Just sayin'. Because what you have here is a fallacy of inductive generalization.

Yes it is possible, but most normal human beings, very early on in life, know the difference between right and wrong. Those that might have a disorder - bipolar, schizophrenia, even Aspergers - might get a pass. But the rest of us? We make a choice...whether it be chemically enhanced by drugs or alcohol or just normal behaviour.

I think income has something to do with it.

We've had a lot of shootings around here but it seems the only ones that media wants to focus on is these nut-cases.

One case of a nut shooting up a mall in Oregon that was stopped by a private citizen with a registered gun got some notice but the particulars were ignored. They can't use that type of shooting.

 

[007]

I'm a bit tired of hearing the left whining about gun violence and then discovering that yet another violent movie has been released like "Gangster Squad" and "Django" or "Chainsaw Massacre".

There is plenty of other subject matter out there you can make movies about other than gun violence or mass-murder. Change starts from within Hollywood.

One of the reasons America is such a violent society is because Hollywood spends so much time glorying gun-wielding assholes. Maybe being a good upstanding member of a society should be stressed a bit more in movies.

Aaaaww c'mon mud, be reasonable, nothing like a good ole movie like BULLET TO THE HEAD to make everyone feel better about a nutjob gunning down a bunch of innocent people, it's just what everyone needs to make them forget about it...

 

[mudwhistle]

I'm a bit tired of hearing the left whining about gun violence and then discovering that yet another violent movie has been released like "Gangster Squad" and "Django" or "Chainsaw Massacre".

There is plenty of other subject matter out there you can make movies about other than gun violence or mass-murder. Change starts from within Hollywood.

One of the reasons America is such a violent society is because Hollywood spends so much time glorying gun-wielding assholes. Maybe being a good upstanding member of a society should be stressed a bit more in movies.

Aaaaww c'mon mud, be reasonable, nothing like a good ole movie like BULLET TO THE HEAD to make everyone feel better about a nutjob gunning down a bunch of innocent people, it's just what everyone needs to make them forget about it...

Yeah, that'll be a good one. Love the title.

My point being the obvious hypocrisy of the left and in Hollywood.

 

[007]

I'm a bit tired of hearing the left whining about gun violence and then discovering that yet another violent movie has been released like "Gangster Squad" and "Django" or "Chainsaw Massacre".

There is plenty of other subject matter out there you can make movies about other than gun violence or mass-murder. Change starts from within Hollywood.

One of the reasons America is such a violent society is because Hollywood spends so much time glorying gun-wielding assholes. Maybe being a good upstanding member of a society should be stressed a bit more in movies.

Aaaaww c'mon mud, be reasonable, nothing like a good ole movie like BULLET TO THE HEAD to make everyone feel better about a nutjob gunning down a bunch of innocent people, it's just what everyone needs to make them forget about it...

Yeah, that'll be a good one. Love the title.

My point being the obvious hypocrisy of the left and in Hollywood.

The left are masters at hypocrisy and shifting the blame.

 

[Pogo]

And I've watched hundreds of violent movies - as have many of my friends - yet none of us have ever been in trouble with the police or assaulted anyone.
People who commit violent acts are responsible for those acts. Nobody else.

Could it not be that the same stimulus affects different people in different ways?

Just sayin'. Because what you have here is a fallacy of inductive generalization.

Yes it is possible, but most normal human beings, very early on in life, know the difference between right and wrong. Those that might have a disorder - bipolar, schizophrenia, even Aspergers - might get a pass. But the rest of us? We make a choice...whether it be chemically enhanced by drugs or alcohol or just normal behaviour.

I think you're grossly oversimplifying here, and I'll thank you to leave the utter irrelevancy of Asperger's out.

"Knowing the difference between right and wrong" is clearly not the issue. Adam Lanza, like many before him, clearly knew what he was doing was wrong, since he turned his weapon on himself when the law showed up. The point here is not moral choices but violence-as-a-value and how its portrayal in (for the purposes of this thread) entertainment media, sets and glorifies and reinforces that value. Graphically.

What one does with that value later on is a separate question.

 

[Rozman]

I'm a bit tired of hearing the left whining about gun violence and then discovering that yet another violent movie has been released like "Gangster Squad" and "Django" or "Chainsaw Massacre".

There is plenty of other subject matter out there you can make movies about other than gun violence or mass-murder. Change starts from within Hollywood.

One of the reasons America is such a violent society is because Hollywood spends so much time glorying gun-wielding assholes. Maybe being a good upstanding member of a society should be stressed a bit more in movies.

I was born in the 1950's...
Most of what we had on TV were war movies or Cowboy and Indian movies.
As an adult living in a large city and having the constant exposure to violent TV shows,movies,literature,video games,real life I still don't have the desire to own a gun or rifle.

In the future that may change.But why haven't I been driven to having a gun of some kind if some or all of what I mentioned above were reasons for people to get guns.

Hollywood produces movies they feel people want to see.
And judging from box office results that seems to be true.

 

[Pogo]

I'm a bit tired of hearing the left whining about gun violence and then discovering that yet another violent movie has been released like "Gangster Squad" and "Django" or "Chainsaw Massacre".

There is plenty of other subject matter out there you can make movies about other than gun violence or mass-murder. Change starts from within Hollywood.

One of the reasons America is such a violent society is because Hollywood spends so much time glorying gun-wielding assholes. Maybe being a good upstanding member of a society should be stressed a bit more in movies.

I was born in the 1950's...
Most of what we had on TV were war movies or Cowboy and Indian movies.
As an adult living in a large city and having the constant exposure to violent TV shows,movies,literature,video games,real life I still don't have the desire to own a gun or rifle.

In the future that may change.But why haven't I been driven to having a gun of some kind if some or all of what I mentioned above were reasons for people to get guns.

Same is true of me, all of it. But two considerations:
(a) the fact that it didn't have such an effect on you or me doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect on anyone (we've all seen the 90-year-old smoker who never got cancer -- this is the same inductive generalization committed a few posts back;
...and (b) I don't think anyone's projecting that these graphic images give people reasons to "get guns", or "get" anything. What they do is reinforce the idea that the way to deal with certain situations is with a gun -- whether owning one applies to you or not. As noted before, what you do with that value is a separate question.

I can't see how a viewer can watch shootings, stabbings, torture, etc without being on some level desensitized to the realities of what these acts mean in real life. At the very least desensitized.

Specific to gun violence and graphics, I keep making this distinction every time some wag brings up "this isn't a gun issue because mass murderer X could have used a baseball bat, a knife, etc etc" -- that's only true if the goal is murder. Murder is specific and personally targeted. A business rip-off or a jilted lover has a specific target for a reason specific to that individual.

In what the Adam Lanzas and James Holmes and Jared Loughners do, the goal is not murder -- it's carnage. It's the visual feedback of strafing random innocent people and watching them scatter and bleed. You cannot do that with a baseball bat. You can't do it with a knife or a poison or anything else. You can only do it with a gun. We all know that, and if we ever forget that, entertainment media will step in to remind us on a daily basis.

Yes, it is a leap from that to the real world. But if I know you are suicidal and I take you to a bridge and advise you on the best place to jump from, well at least I can honestly say I didn't push you.