Shelby Kinney Margaret Chaplin
English 1301
24 February 2013
Violence Makes the World Go Round
Are there too many violent and movies in the world today? Do we take what we see on the screen and portray it to our real life and then blame the media later for influencing it? If we do it and we are blind to it, do we blame the media for not making us responsible for knowing right from wrong? The first thing to realize is that America is truly obsessed with violence. If we were to remove the violence from a movie, no one would go to see it. Games or movies that have less violence don’t sell as much as extreme gore games or movies. In America, it’s all about what sells and what doesn’t sell! Money makes the world go around.
Opinions on the matter of media violence don’t seem to slow it down any. This is not an ignored matter, just over looked. There is totally too much media violence to stop in one debate. If a person goes to the movies to see a violent action film and the violence is not as extreme as expected, the movie is graded as not good. The movie theatres in every city have a wide range of action movies with enough believable violence to keep people glued to the screen and afterwards honor it as a good movie. Can seeing so much believable violence influence a young person to actually wanting to commit a crime? Did Adam Lanza really glorify Anders Breivik, a Norwegian man who killed 77 people in July 2011, so much that he felt that he was in pure competition with Breivik? ABC’s Good Morning America stated that he would lock himself up in a basement where no one can find him and play violent videogames all day, lock away from reality.
The shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary sent chills down the spine of America and everybody felt bad for those kids. Nobody really knows why Lanza killed these innocent children, but the media states that he was influenced by Breivik’s bloody massacre that took place in Norway a couple years earlier. Multiple reasons surface, one reason noticed was that his mother assumed that he was mentally unstable. Every single reason remains unproven, so the massacre is still under investigation. The rumor of Lanza locking himself away from reality and playing violent videogames surpasses the realness of being any reason why he murdered those kids. During Breivik’s trail, Breivik stated that he actually played violent videogames like Call of Duty to plan for the killings. Sam Perez in an online article on policymic.com stated, “Predictively, the media has overemphasized the impact violent video games had on Breivik’s behavior before his attack, using it as a scapegoat for many other issues that lead to the heinous attack.” (Perez).
According to Raj, a cabdriver in Dallas, Texas, “people can be influenced by almost anything and it does depend on the person” was the ending statement after a 15 minute interview. Raj’s first response to, Do you think that media violence has an influence on kids and how violent they become or even play a part in the kid’s violence?, was Yes. Raj stated that “Little kids are like sponges, they soak up everything in their head and every little kid reacts different to certain situations.” He continues, “You can’t just blame the media, it factors down to the kid’s personal life and what goes on in the kid’s home. If a kid witnesses his father hitting his wife and it is brushed off and not being looked at as a bad thing, that kid can grow up to be abusive to his wife and not think anything wrong of it.” When questioned, do you think that once the kid grows up he, assuming it’s a boy because the reference to beating his wife, should know right from wrong? Raj answered, “Of course the kid should know better, but if the kid witnesses it growing up, he might think that no matter what people say, that is the only way to get his point across to your wife and being dominant to her, well, you hit her until she obeys your word.” I interrupted him before my destination point.
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