A couple of weeks ago I took in Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie Django Unchained. For those of you who know nothing about Tarantino or his movies, his films are the gold standard for Hollywood violent movie content.
This slavery-era epic contains scenes of rival plantation owners engaging their largest slaves in hand-to-hand combat to the death while they sit by sipping mint juleps, includes a scene of dogs mauling a man chained to a tree, and countless gunfights, stabbings and explosions.
But with all the blood and guts that his movie had to offer, the most horrific scene I took in that afternoon was not part of the movie at all. It was when I saw a couple walk into the theater with their two children, the oldest no more than six years old. The reactions I’ve gotten from people I have told this story have ranged from disgust to sheer horror to calls for licensing requirements for parents. But, at its core, the real concern here has to be what effect does exposure to such violent content have on young minds.
To that end, one of the few proposals to come out of the White House in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre that might actually have a chance of preventing such a tragedy in the future was President Obama’s call for the CDC to resume studies into the causes of such violent behavior including the effects of violence in media on the young.
This is not to say that violence in video games or movies has somehow proven itself to be the cause of any particular mass shooting or other violent tragedy, but if you look at recent incidents it doesn’t take a team of scientists to recognize some correlation between the two.
The killer of 77 innocent campers in Norway a couple years ago reportedly told authorities that he played countless hours of “Call of Duty Modern Warfare” to rehearse for his massacre. The Columbine shooters were heavily into the game “Doom”, and initial reports regarding the Sandy Hook shooting indicated that Adam Lanza was also a heavy participant in first-person shooter games. And most recently, the 15-year-old who slaughtered his family two weeks ago in New Mexico, and had planned on shooting up a local Wal-Mart, also was “heavily” into violent video games.
There are numerous other examples of the same.
Does this mean that video games directly caused these killings? Of course not. Does it mean that the heavy exposure to such content might have desensitized these developing psyches to the real world effect and consequence of such violence? Is there a possibility that immersion in such violent content could cause a detachment from reality and confusion between the real and the fantasy? It doesn’t seem so far-fetched and with the pervasive presence of such content in all our media, it’s at least worthy of some more study.
Unfortunately, instead of more focus on root causes of violent behavior, or proposing solutions to fix a broken down mental health system, our national discourse as of late has been guided by grandstanding politicians proposing bans on “scary looking” weapons that functionally will do no more or less harm than those that would remain perfectly legal. It might feel good to ban “assault weapons” but it has been shown to do little to nothing to prevent violent gun crime. If there is a better example of form over substance in creating policy I have yet to find one. But, at least there are a few proposals out there that are looking at the real problem.
As for the “parenting” that I witnessed, that I fear may be a bigger problem that no amount of study will help us solve. Almost 20 years ago Hilary Clinton drew the ire of many conservative pundits when she released a book called It Takes A Village. The thrust of the book, which was a play on an old African proverb, was that it takes a village, or it takes all of us, to raise our children. I remember at the time siding with those who said it doesn’t take a village, it takes stronger families. And while I generally believe the same thing, perhaps I would modify that sentiment today. Maybe it doesn’t take a village, but when I see the village idiots taking their children to see a Tarantino movie, it makes me wonder.
