When I was growing up, plenty of people died in films — in westerns, crime dramas, war movies, tales of knights in shining armor, horror flicks. And as kids were inclined to do, we made up a lot of games based on Hollywood entertainment. We routinely killed our best friends in mock army battles, gunfights, shootouts, and duels. Of course it was all make-believe, just as the depictions of killing in the movies we saw were make believe. We knew it was all make-believe. We were never inspired to really kill anyone by the movies we saw at Saturday matinees. My Quaker grandmother may have hated the fact that I wore a holster with a toy six-gun, but she’d be pleased to know that in my entire life I’ve never been even tempted to shoot someone with a real one.
So why should kids today be any different? Well odds are they aren’t. Odds are they’re no more influenced to commit heinous crimes by the movies they see than we were. But movies are a handy scapegoat for the NRA, which will blame the high American murder-by-gun rate on everything except where blame belongs — on the availability of guns that makes bloody acts of violence so easy for the occasional person who loses it.
Liberal Buzz 