Skribs. I'm not making the case that there is no room for violence in art or entertainment. It goes back for centuries. In the original "Little Red Riding Hood", the main character was eaten by the Wolf!
This is very true of many folk and fairy tales, as well as old mountain ballads like "Little Sadie".
But there is something undeniably influential about the visual image to people, well above and beyond the spoken or written word. This past election, politicians spent a record amount (hundreds of billions, as I recall) on advertising, and most of that went to television. Politicians, including those who are for a gun ban, seem to acknowledge that TV has an impact above and beyond the written word.
The University of Michigan says the typical American will see
16,000 dramatized killings on TV during their childhood, and
200,000 acts of violence. To think that TV, when dealing with
these kind of numbers, doesn't have an impact on people, especially children, isn't reality. That's why movies in theaters have a restrictive age related rating system - because the visual image has a potentially negative impact or influence on kids. Hollywood acknowledges that. Yet they seem,
generally speaking, to feel immune from criticism of their own role in violence in our society.
Why? It might be because movies and television are a $200 - $300 billion (annual) industry, as opposed to firearms, which is a $4 billion annual industry. That's just movies and television. Collectively, the entertainment industry is estimated to be the fourth largest industry in the US, and one of the largest in the world. When famous actors make a substantial portion of that amount - millions of dollars per movie - I'm not going to give them a pass on culpability. There may be a "willing suspension of disbelief" component to acting and theater, but it's hard to suspend that disbelief when a celebrity who makes a fortune for each acting job condemns violence while at the same time glorifying it.
