Column:

There will be blood

By Charles Austin

Published Sept. 16, 2008

As Americans, we love violence. America is the birthplace of "Kill Bill," "Grand Theft Auto" and gangster rap. We're habitual war-starters and our vice president shot an old man in the face. Jack Nicholson reportedly once said of movies, "If you suck on a tit, the movie gets an R rating. If you hack it off with an ax, it will be PG."

Sometimes it seems like the only reason we even have sex is so we can create more people to gleefully slaughter later. With our national affinity for artery-slicing, ass-kicking action, it's no wonder why so many middle-aged mothers dread their 13-year-old kids listening to 50 Cent and playing "Resident Evil." But I can't imagine that these things desensitize us to violence at all.

To argue that movies, music and video games desensitize us to violence is like arguing that watching the Food Network desensitizes us to eating. Watching "Good Eats" doesn't fundamentally change the way I eat food. At best, watching the Food Network will teach you to make new dishes. At its worst, playing a lot of "Halo" will teach a child how to more precisely aim absurd weapons at pixilated aliens in a surreal, digital environment.

We live in a country where almost none of us slaughter our own animals for consumption. In a world before refrigeration and grocery stores, killing animals was part of sustaining a family. I find it hard to believe that shooting fake weapons at fictional creatures on a two-dimensional screen instills even remotely as many violent tendencies in a child as watching his father slice apart an animal and remove its innards in front of his eyes.

I hate when people use the argument that movies and video games somehow distort children's realities, that they somehow lose sight of the difference between real violence and fictional violence.

The lines of reality are not blurred. Kids know that fast food never really looks as juicy and delicious as it does on the commercials and they know that killing is never as enjoyable or righteous as pop culture may make it seem. The television screen is a funhouse mirror to reality and anyone with half a brain knows this.

If we were truly desensitized to violence, I could walk into a sandwich shop with a loaded pistol, point it at an employee's face, tell him to make me a sandwich then shoot him once he gave it to me. And nobody would care.

But that's not even remotely how the world works. We are still alarmed every time a student brings a gun to school, and I guarantee if I walked into a sandwich shop swinging a pistol around it would be a cause for concern.

Pop culture didn't invent violence; it just made it more entertaining. I understand how it seems twisted to turn actual bloodshed into fictional entertainment, but I think it takes a far more twisted person to turn fictional entertainment into actual bloodshed. There are always going to be violent outliers in any society, and censoring violence in fiction would never have a profound effect on that small contingent of a society that's unstable enough to commit heinous crimes.

And who knows, as those of us who have grown up with violent video games and explicit music eventually have children and families of our own, maybe we'll take responsibility and stop placing the blame for deviant behavior on the same entertainment we help to cultivate. In the meantime, I just think it's funny to hear people who lived through World War II complaining about Chamillionaire using swear words and talking about his gun.