No. Cain and Abel didn't have TV or Nintendo.
Posted on 08/24/2013 4:10:28 PM PDT by neverdem
EARLIER this summer the actor Jim Carrey, a star of the new superhero movie “Kick-Ass 2,” tweeted that he was distancing himself from the film because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “in all good conscience I cannot support” the movie’s extensive and graphically violent scenes.
Mark Millar, a creator of the “Kick-Ass” comic book series and one of the movie’s executive producers, responded that he has “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.”
While Mr. Carrey’s point of view has its adherents, most people reflexively agree with Mr. Millar. After all, the logic goes, millions of Americans see violent imagery in films and on TV every day, but vanishingly few become killers.
But a growing body of research indicates that this reasoning may be off base. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor. We would never say: “I’ve smoked cigarettes for a long time, and I don’t have lung cancer. Therefore there’s no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.” So why use such flawed reasoning when it comes to media violence?
There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength.
Mr. Comstock and Ms. Paik also conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
In movies, it's used to send messages. What happens to these Mafiosos in the movies? They get offed. That's part of the lesson.
No. Cain and Abel didn't have TV or Nintendo.
Media violence teases sick minds.
carrey is an azzhole of the first magnitude...
Normal people wouldn't say it, but there is a bunch of FReepers who say it all the time.
It can’t help the weakest among us.
Given the concern the left voices over a gun crazed culture it’s interesting how much they ignore the violence in media.
The left sells the violence, starts the race wars, uses the media money for funding and works to disarm us.
and JK Rowling is recruiting for Satan
TV violence in the past, didn’t glorify it, but did distinguish between good & bad.
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Very true. And it was always easy to know which ones were the good guys and which ones were the bad guys.
I am so so so on the same page with you here. If they didn't blast every gun story to the world many disturbed folk would find another way to act out.
What we have today are a hundred Columbine copycats.
The MSM promotes violence and racism.
East Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Office officials say they believe an 8-year-old intentionally pulled the trigger and killed an elderly woman Thursday evening right after playing ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’
http://www.wafb.com/story/23242078/investigators-believe-8-year-old-intentionally-killed-90-year-old-woman
I remember reading about a study years ago that indicated violent tv shows increased the amount of child abuse.
The boy’s caregiver, Marie Smothers, was sitting in a chair and watching television inside her caravan in Slaughter, Louisiana, when the boy fired one round and killed her, the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Office said.
He had used the elderly woman’s .38-caliber pistol, the boy’s father said.
That’s an important point.
I’m in favor of freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s healthy for anyone anywhere any time to be exposed to anything and everything that the media produce.
The age of the viewer is a factor.
The amount of viewing is a factor.
I’ve read multiple studies and argued with a few conservatives on this issue.
The cigarette analogy is a good one.
Common sense (and it’s backed up by various studies) says that allowing a young child to spend hour after hour immersed in gory, violent imagery cannot be healthy for his development. IIRC, the most critical ages were 8-12 years.
Consider these differences from the past: Your point about the glorification of violence. Your point about distinguishing good from bad. The level of goriness is much higher than in the past. The frequency of violence is much higher than in the past. The number of hours spent viewing violence is much higher than in the past. The number of sources is much higher than in the past. Kids used to only see movies, so maybe once a week. Then TV became common, but the number of channels and the shows available were limited. Now many, if not most, kids have access to cable which means that by flipping channels they are able to view violence 24/7 if they want to. Most parents are not monitoring, much less restricting, their kids viewing because they are more concerned with being pals than with being parents. Add in the internet. Add in violent video games.
This all serves to “normalize” violence in the mind of the viewer - even more so in the mind of a younger viewer. Decision making skills and self-restraint are not fully developed until the 20s. Coping mechanisms and patterns are established primarily in the late teens and early twenties.
Many viewers are unable to comprehend the reality of violence when they have been exposed to so much artificial violence. On TV, victims are often fully recovered by the next week.
For many viewers, the constant exposure to violence makes them jaded. Think back to something you once found distasteful - gutting a fish, dissecting a frog, changing a diaper. For most of us, if we repeat those actions on a regular basis, they lose their initial “ick” factor and become fairly mundane. The same happens with violence. It loses its shock value. In doing so, especially on such a wide swath of the population, it steals some of our humanity.
As well, has anyone noticed what has happened to women?? Society changes based on the messages it receives that tell it what’s ok and what’s not. Every single film, in order to make women “equal” with men, have women fighting and being fought against......by MEN. You don’t think that has repercussions as to how men feel towards women? They are open season now, and btw they love it (ha ha), at least Hollywood actresses who play them do, always spouting off about “Ya! Girl Power!”. They can’t complain then, when men begin to believe the new norm and HIT women!!! No more, “a boy never hits a girl”. That would be sexist!
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