“Our culture seems to have taken a road that glorifies violence,” James Lubker writes at wcfcourier.com. “Television and computer-video games provide an endless source of violence . . .
Consider that we now have games people “play” by pointing guns at each other and shooting a variety of projectiles at other human beings. We live in a culture where on the one hand we consider it a game to shoot one another, and yet on the other hand we are appalled at the actual shooting of people with real bullets.
The problem being?
I have no idea. Gun-heavy TV shows are, in the main, lessons in Judeo-Christian morality. Promoting those values is a good thing, not a bad thing. By the same token, simulated gunplay is a safe outlet for 99.99 percent of testosterone-crazed males, all of whom are genetically wired to shoot bad guys.
But what do I know? That I don’t like the sound of this: “A closer monitoring of all those ‘games’ and who ‘plays’ them would help [reduce “gun violence’].”
The Second Amendment protects the First, and vice versa. But there is a case to be made that entertainment glorifying gangland violence stimulates gangland violence. I’m not going to make it, but it is there. As is an interesting fact: America’s violent crime rate has been falling for decades. So . . .
Does American culture glorify “gun violence”? If so, is that a problem? In fact, is zero tolerance America becoming too soft?