Violence as Entertainment

There is more to the problem of gun violence, particularly as it tragically takes place in American schools, than is being mentioned in the commentaries I have seen. I refer to the constant flow of violence put forth by the entertainment/video game industries.

I agree that we need legislative action to control the proliferation of all guns, particularly of handguns and of so-called assault weapons and their kin. We need enforceable background checks on all gun sales, and bans on weapons no civilian should ever need.

I also agree that we need to address mental health issues and the challenges to identifying and treating all who suffer mentally. Adequate and appropriate funding is a critical matter that is always a tough sell, but perhaps it will get a more sympathetic hearing if we can sustain our concern about what happened yesterday for more than a week. I do worry, however, about the present administration getting too deeply into questions of what constitutes mental illness, given the history of oppressive governments accusing their adversaries of being mentally ill so they can lock them up or render them powerless in some other way.

What I have not seen or heard is much discussion of the cultural context in which these shootings continue to take place. That context is a society that seems to celebrate violence and bloodshed as a means to fame and perhaps even to fortune. This is something we do not wish to face, and that I expect my liberal friends to try to deny.

For example, watch the promotions for television shows and films. How many of them focus on violence, even if they do not celebrate it? Many graphically portray bloodshed, while many others seem to sanitize it by showing no blood at all, leaving what it really looked like to viewers’ eager imaginations. Producers and directors know what sells, and violence sells very well indeed.

What little I know about video games strikes me much the same way. I’ve watched people play games in which their guns mow down victims one after another. It adds up to a numerical score, a score that in real life is a human score.

Unless parents/guardians keep it from them, very young children are often exposed to all of this, and they grow up with it.

In addition, popular music can seem to make violence okay, and cruel words directed against others – emanating from the Web to the White House – teach the young that it is okay to use the vilest hurtful language when you don't like or even know someone. Children grow up in a cultural continuum of violence and bloodshed and some of them – too many of them – one day engage in it themselves.

Don’t tell me it’s always been so. Yes, we listened to radio programs and saw movies and played games of “cops and robbers” and “cowboys and Indians,” but I do not think many of us were so totally immersed in that play that we forget who we and the other person really were. I doubt that any of the kids I played those games with and watched those movies with ever imagined firing a gun into a crowd of faceless strangers just because we were angry at the world. And if that thought did go through our heads, we immediately heard in our conscience the voice of a parent or preacher warning us that murdering anyone for any reason was just plain wrong.

Perhaps that’s the heart of the problem: so many voices, the commercially successful voices, yell violence at us, but the calming voices of preachers, parents, and principals are either not heard at all or are discounted as coming from dated authority figures, sounds from a long-forgotten age. Ours is the age of me and mine; why can’t I do what I want to do when I want to do it, even at the cost of another’s life?

Who wants to take on the mighty entertainment industry that foists violence upon us because we make it profitable for it to do so? The first amendment rightly puts this job beyond the making of laws, and there are not enough mental health professionals in the world to help all of that industry’s unwitting victims. What surprises me is that few seem to dare talk about this aspect of violence in our society. Until that happens, it is unlikely that we will stop the flow of blood in our schools and on our streets.