Worldwide? Pretty small. In America, we actually have numbers for this. It turns out there are a whole lot more people who have access to pretend violent media than have access to semiautomatic rifles.
the idea that most peoples violent thoughts or urges come from the entertainment or media they consume is incredibly simplistic. a larger formative role is the rest of their environment, food security, abuse, social connections, etc etc. it’s not really about having people woth fewer violent urges, it is about providing people with outlets for their violent urges that are less harmful to those around them.
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i mean in america. the world doesn’t have a universal 2a problem that provides a magical 20 word doctrine that “covers” all situations from bears and feral pigs, home/self defense, AND government oppression.
I don’t think violent video games or movies are in and of themselves a problem, but I do think America’s cultural view of the efficacy of violence is a contributing factor. Matt Taibbi had a great piece about this after Parkland, I’ve posted it before but here it is again.
The people who point at pop culture as the reason disturbed kids and lone-wolf madmen go on killing sprees are half right. But images of violence are less the problem than the messages behind them, which are profoundly intertwined with deep-seated cultural ideas about the virtue of military supremacy and the political efficacy of violence.
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I should maybe reread it before commenting, I remember liking it at the time. But I think we’ve moved a bit away from this. How many recent shooters have been on 4chan or the similar reddits? We know where a large percentage of these people are being radicalized. We know the methods through which they enact their violence. Everything else just seems like a mission past the obvious. How many times can someone be posting incel/violent stuff on 4chan, then kill scores of people with an AR15 before we point to those specific things as more of a problem than media, culture etc?
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I thought that while it was agreed that the consumption of violent media doesn’t cause violent behavior per se, it definitely is a risk factor in terms of whether someone will develop violent behavior. Just doing a quick search for studies on this and I found the following article from Psychiatric Times (just selected the first few that were interesting, not trying to cherry pick ones that supported my pre-conception);
Article looks at various studies on the issue, and they indicated that consumption of violent media increased the likelihood that children developed more aggression. Assuming I’m reading it right, it looked at both studies that looked for correlation and those that looked for causation (e.g. seeing if kids who were consuming more violent media increased their aggression more as they aged compared to kids that consumed less violent media).
“In a Psychiatric Times interview, psychologist Craig Anderson, PhD, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, said the evidence for the media violence–aggression link is very strong from every major type of study design: randomized experiments, cross-sectional correlation studies, and longitudinal studies.”
Here’s a link to one of the cited studies which found that “The results also showed that there were overall modest but significant effect sizes for exposure to media violence on aggressive behaviors, aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, arousal levels, and helping behavior.”
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Not Alex or Geddy, but congrats being cancer free 15 months rush.
https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1530307116753465344
Probably alow pony but still darkly funny
ugh this is going to derail the national discourse on gun control
Ha, that’s not bad, they should totally test that in some focus groups. Maybe also try something along the lines of “this is what happens when everybody disrespects the police all the time, they didn’t want to get falsely charged with murder like Kyle Rittenhouse”.
Switzerland has a fair amount of guns. The percentage of households with a gun is about 22% and in the US it’s about 44% (2x) while the number of guns per capita in the us is 4x. Gun related homicide rate is 12 times higher in the US.
Also, I don’t think school shootings are totally independent of the general homicide rate, but they aren’t exactly the same and may have different factors at play. And they are a very tiny percentage of the overall homicides.
Maybe all this has something to do with school shooters becoming famous celebrities? Maybe getting their picture and name all over CNN is an inspiration to others? It often feels hard to tell a news story from a movie.
I actually doubt this. I think that a lot of people try to project on to school shooters motives that are at least understandable to a typical person. We can vaguely understand that someone, especially a teen, might want to “be famous”. We can understand that if a normal person was bullied incessantly they may lash out in violence. But I think the reality of school shooters is mostly that a certain percentage of the population will be psychopaths, when the population goes up there will always be more psychopaths purely because of math, and USA#1 is the optimal culture for a psychopath to do the most damage because psychopathic traits are encouraged and rewarded by American culture and Americans allow teen psychopaths access to AR-15s and similar weapons. The root cause of school shootings in the US is the large number of psychopaths all around us all the time, which is the kind of truth that people will literally refuse to engage with because it is just too upsetting to them that this horrendous truth is something they have no control over. They do (or at least should) have control over other stuff like access to guns, but because Republicans have made guns a wedge issue the obvious smart thing to do is not going to happen. Other vague gestures that attempt to wrangle control of the situation are really desperate window dressing.
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The problem here is clearly how the US adresses mental health.
So you want free healthcare and treatment for people with mental health problems?
Lol no, that‘s socialism.
So you wart background checks to make sure they cannot get access to guns?
Lol no, that would limit their Freedom.
So what‘s your mental health solution then?
Well, lock them up, of course.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1530309367429484545?s=21&t=JqMpcr5R0DucsIarVl1Teg
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Zero Energy Trump up there.
Definitely doesn’t have the heart to be POTUS again. But he’ll run because he wants the attention and his supporters will drag his carcass to a second term.
Trump’s definition of mental health runs pretty close to his definition for “lock her up”.
DOOOOOOOOORRRRSSSSS!
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