Do
the video game industry, media and movies cause violence? The debate rages over the impact of our
entertainment choices as they affect our behavior with gun violence.
Our
culture is saturated with violent images, yet the vast majority of people do
not act on such as motivation. Even
those who are armed do not. For example,
in the US in 2009 there were an estimated 310 million non-military firearms (CNN,
09/09/12), and 326,090 firearm incidents* (factcheck.org). That is .0015 firearm incidents per gun.
The
US is not uniquely violent. Our 4.5% of
the world’s population owns 40% of all non-military firearms (Huffington Post,
12/20/12, Joe Van Brussel). Yet our
overall rates of per capita violence are similar to Australia, Canada and
Western Europe, other than homicide.
There are nations with worse per capita rates for gun homicide: Mexico, South Africa and Colombia for example
(United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). Japan’s movie and animated literature industry
is one of the most graphically violent in the world, and yet, as a society, its
rates of violent crime are some of the lowest.
Rather
than the media/movie industry causing violence in our culture, I would suggest
our culture’s attitude towards violence is what fuels its expression in our
media.
We
hold a deeply ingrained cultural conviction that violence can solve our
problems, and we find fictional depiction of that conviction entertaining.
The
“good guy” shoots the “bay guy” and walks away having saved the day and securing
possibilities for the future. We dilute
the impact and terror of violence by reducing it to cartoon images. Our movies and video games present violence
in ways we can manage; giving us the illusion that it can be controlled at some
level, or that it has some enduring meaning.
We want to believe that violence can have a redeeming purpose, as ugly
and brutal as it might be. So we act it
out in our media/artistic/entertainment expressions in safe and stylized ways.
Haven't
humans done so since the dawn of history?
Europeans have been doing so since the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides (5th century BCE); primal people did so around the evening fire;
our youth do so today watching it on screens, big and small.
This
is not necessarily a bad thing.
Rehearsing violence and our response to it may allow us vicarious and
safe ways to express the anger and fear that go with it. But as rational as such behavior may seem for
the survival of a community, in the end that is not how violence works.
Violence
destroys, demeans and ruins the both victim and the perpetrator at one level or
another. Singular acts of violence may
be necessary for self-defense or preservation but "the good guy"
never just walks away from it; the increasing rates of PTSD (Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder) and suicide in our armed forces after ten years of war in Iraq
and Afghanistan may be indicative.
Nations
may have no choice but to use deadly force to defend or survive, but victory
rarely guarantees peace; it may buy a period of the cessation of violence, but
by definition that is not "peace." Attempts to make violence palatable are
inherently false, misleading and spiritually bankrupt.
We
go and pay our entertainment money to see/hear/or play at violence only if we
have disconnected the reality of violence from our psyche, our souls. Such compartmentalization may be an effective
defense mechanism. It may be a necessary
defense mechanism. But there is a cost
to pay for it.
In
response to the recent exchange of rocket violence between the Palestinians of
the Gaza Strip and Israel, US President Barack Obama said in Israel's defense, "There's
no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens
from outside its borders."
(11/19/12)
This
is an astonishing statement from the executive of a government doing just that
with robotic drone aircraft.
The
New America Foundation estimates that in Pakistan, between 1,953 and 3,279
people have been killed by drones since 2004, and that between 18% and 23% of
them were not militants. The nonmilitant casualty rate was down to about 10% in
2012, the group says. In Yemen, the
group estimates between 646 and 928 people have been killed in a combination of
drone strikes and airstrikes, and 623 to 860 of those killed were militants. Only about 2% of those killed have been high-level
targets, the group said (CNN, 02/10/13).
We
are at war against a real and determined enemy to be sure. There are certainly going to be collateral victims. We can be confident that our military forces
go out of their way, even putting themselves in danger, to limit such
collateral losses. The citizens of our
country, myself included, do not want to see our uniformed men and women take
casualties, and drones can always be replaced.
Drones are effective war machines, getting to locations other assets
couldn't.
And.
We
absolutely are asking other countries to tolerate our missiles raining down on
their citizens from the sky.
I
have to imagine that you can only do that if you've been able somewhere
psychologically, spiritually, emotionally to disconnect the realities of such
violence from the intentions of your actions. I imagine that a President can only make such
a statement as President Obama did last November while authorizing violence on
other countries by disconnecting the realities of such violence from one's
mind.
Jesus
says, "Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword." (Matthew
26:52)
Violence
may at times be necessary, but it is always an evil, and it rarely solves our
problems. There will never be enough
targeted assignations or armed guards at schools to keep us safe. You can't kill enough "bad guys" to
be safe.
Violence
only breeds more violence. When will we
invest ourselves in the peacemaking?
*Use of a
firearm in an act of crime or suicide