So the first rule of Fight Club (and movies like that) is nobody markets Fight Club (and movies like that)?
This was brought up before but unless they market movies and pop culture less in Canada and in other countries differently with similar cultures but vastly different gun violence statistics, this whole pop culture boogeyman doesn’t sway me as a viable way to curb gun violence.
Read it again “Champ”-I wasn’t advocating new prisoners and new prisons-I was pointing out that such paths are yet another problem to be solved. If more people are put in prison for gun violence, where do we put people that are already there-our prison system are already a mess as it is.
Yet we are still high compared to the rest of the world. Everything is relative, but nobody seems to be catching up to us yet.
Oh well. That’s my mistake then. Use correct punctuation, please (i.e. question marks). It makes it easier to read when you do. Thanks.
I don’t remember how Fight Club was marketed.
I do remember when Terminator 2 came out, Marvel put out the comic book, the video game was sold at Toys R Us, as well as having an action figure line.
Although Canada and the US share a similar overall western culture, I would like to see the ethnic, economic, and historical differences between the two before I write off any possible contribution from overly violent media.
Are violent books and violent paintings really mass marketed to the mainstream public the way film, music and television is?
And news and documentaries about violence are very different from fictional accounts of the hero righteously killing the bad guys with an assortment of guns. Usually the news and documentaries highlight the victims of violence while movies tend not to do that. When the hero has a shoot out in public, he never accidentally kills a bystander. Or a stray shot doesn’t end up killing someone miles away.
You don’t need Gun Control, you need to have control of your need for guns. I wouldn’t want a complete ban on any gun, because that would obviously never work.
Thing is, if anyone was to try and arrange a “Go without your weapon for a month” campaign, groups like the NRA would throw a fit.
It was a joke. Although you not getting it proves that you don’t know how it was marketed…
So you’d like to see if movie marketing is not a factor before you look at movie marketing as a factor. Brilliant.
No because like I said, I think that violent media helps reinforce violent behavior. And I question how similar they are. And if Canada is not nearly as similar to the US as it’s claimed, that makes a difference.
For example, I don’t expect the rap album I mentioned earlier to have an effect on a white, upper class neighborhood in Canada.
However, in an area with a predominant Mexican-American population and a high concentration of gangs it helped raise the homicide rate as well as gang recruitment.
I think various factors play into the high rate of violent crime in the US, and mass marketed violent media I think is just one of the contributing factors.
We have, as noted, already reduced crime, overall.
Your first two paragraphs are simply unrelated to the real world.
In particular, your claim that reducing shooting deaths would be matched by a corresponding increase in other forms of violent death is ludicrously unrealistic. The kid in my county who wandered into a school cafeteria and murdered three students, wounding a couple of others, would not have had the same body count if he had had to actually strike them with a weapon from which they could defend themselves or even run from.
I am a supporter of the 2d Amendment and I do not have any “magic bullet” (heh) to address the issue of gun violence, but the claim that anyone who wished to inflict harm would successfully inflict the same level of harm if they did not have a firearm is just dumb.
USA ranks about 108th out of 208 nations, according to UN figures. Pretty much square in the middle, eh?
Googling “Mass murder by machete” brings up many, many instances, and that’s just machetes.
How about bombs? How does your kid in the cafeteria defend himself from a bomb?
Besides mass murder is rare. Quick & solitary killing are far more common, and there a knife works perfectly.
Depends on what countries you are comparing us to, I guess…
I agree with this statement. If gun supporters don’t, why don’t they all just get machetes instead? I mean, since they are so comparable.
Actually violence is no longer decreasing in the United States.
According to a bulletin from the USA Department of Justice dated October 2012 there has been a steady rise in violent crime since 2010. The bulletin says a 17% increase.
So we have lost that good momentum that we had since the nineties. It stalled around 2008 and began to rise two years ago.
I have thoughts about how we raise, particularly, our male children in this country. But that’s a whole book by itself.
I remember in the 70s-80s people were saying that increasingly realistic violence in entertainment was bad for the children. Then there were studies done which indicated that it had little influence. It would be interesting to know how those studies were conducted and who sponsored them.
At any rate it’s refreshing to hear others acknowledging that the depiction of some types of violence may have a harmful effect on children susceptible to it. Perhaps the subject of personality development holds some answers.
You know what else correlates to the drop in crime? I found this amazing but perfectly plausible: leaded gasoline.
I’m more interested in knowing who does all the studies that weigh supposed positives of gun ownership against the negatives of their availability and comes out strongly in favour of the positive side. More interestingly, who finances them?
Not culturally similar.
Here.
So, Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with a preponderance of immigrants, and street gangs is ranked as “the safest large metropolitan area in North America” and control of hand guns is not relevant here? I can’t see why anyone could dispute the evidence. I can keep coming back and quoting multiple sites if you wish. Hand guns kill people. Countries of similar cultures have much higher homicide rates entirely due to the availability of hand guns.
That is your defense of your claim? A single 41 year old example of a serial killer and an organized gang on a totally different continent who surrounded villages to kill people in mass attacks during a civil war?
You have effectively proven my point.