The ever frothing Rick Santorum decided, like every other conservatwit, to weigh in on the Las Vegas shooting. Naturally, gun control is completely wrong, because it’s the fault of video games. And Hollywood, of course.
The failed GOP presidential candidate, who appeared Sunday as a panelist on CNN’s “State of the Union,” then suggested violent entertainment may have influenced the 64-year-old gunman.
“Violence in television and the video games — there is a mountain of evidence out there, psychological evidence, about what we’re doing to our young people with these video games, violent video games, and you never hear the left trying to go after Hollywood or the gaming market,” Santorum said. “It is never involved in this discussion. Where is the solution? Here we are. Where is the solution?”
He complained that Democrats had inaccurately blamed firearms for gun violence instead of movies.
Oy. Less talking heads, more thinking brains, please. The murderous shooter was 64 years old, Mr. Santorum. Let that sink in a moment. I’ll soon be 60 myself, so I can say that video games weren’t a thing when us old dinosaurs were young. Christ, colour televisions were still fresh way back when. As for Hollywood, nothing has changed, the effects have gotten better. And there’s more swearing. I’m a fan of old movies, in particular, old noir. There’s a whole lot of nastiness in movies, going way back, many of them now considered to be classics. Movies you couldn’t possibly consider to be in any way a moral one to watch, unless you were looking for awful morals, and that certainly includes those old bible movies. You could just paste a ‘a god behaving abominably’ on those. When I was young, and before that even, war movies were incredibly popular. Nothing but violence. Westerns, very popular – people shooting and people dropping dead every 5 seconds. People hanging out in the saloon. Where else? Always had women of negotiable love hanging about, too. Movies have always provided people with a relief valve, a drop into fantasy for a while, where they can escape the cares of everyday life. Same goes for video games. That’s not a bad thing, even though there is always plenty of room for improvement.
I think you can easily place the blame for gun violence on those who love them, cuddle them, and fondle them all the way to their dramatic suicide. You can blame gun violence on the gun culture nourished by the government. You can blame gun violence on the NRA, which actively promotes it. You can blame gun violence on the sheer ubiquity of guns allowed in uStates. Let’s not be looking to video games and movies, because the problem doesn’t lie there, but I expect you’re well aware of that, Mr. Santorum.
Via Raw Story.
Hollywood helps push the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” narrative anyways, so complaints like Santorum’s are silly.
But Hollywood has always done that. “Good guy with a gun” is one old fuckin’ plot. Before that, it was “Good guy with a sword.”
I’m 62 and I’m dead sure I remember comic books being a bad influence.
Oh yes, they were. Very bad.
One bad influence I can recall is Scooby-Doo. It was always some bad guy in a mask with a mundane boring motive like money, not a far more plausible ancient alien astronaut disinfecting the planet.
Australians, Canadians, British, New Zealanders, Irish, all watch the same movies and play the same games as Americans. Where is their gun violence? Their mass shootings on an almost daily basis?
Why are gun fondlers such snowflakes when we ask them to look at the reasons why Americans shoot each other at such an alarming rate?
It’s a good question, and I haven’t seen a decent answer yet. The sickness here runs very deep.
My father wouldn’t let us read comic books. Some pediatrician said it lead to delinquency. Said pediatrician saw that boys in a detention home read them so therefore … delinquency. That was the totality of the “research.” Of course, this is back when major Marvel and DC comics sold literally millions of copies a month. So you could have gone to literally any place there were children and seen them reading comics.
If video games were a problem we’d have seen a massive explosion of crimes well before now. Instead, crime appears to connect to economic and political uncertainty.
chigau:
There’s a good book on that The Five Cent Plague It turns out the whole comics crisis was driven by one guy who really hated comics. Naturally it never correlated to any kind of violence. Other than the Korean War, I mean.
Marcus, that’s The Ten Cent Plague: by David Hadju.
Marcus, that’s The Ten Cent Plague: by David Hadju.
Wow, the price doubled!
Well, Pong was released in 1972, so I suppose the shooter could have played it when he was 19. The connection to his later actions kind of escapes me, though.
My local library has it. I’ll give it a go.
Hm. So, Mr Santorum, let me give you a hypothetical:
But you’ll never get a journalist to actually ask a question that forces the guest to give up on a talking point. It’s rude, you know.
LOL! I have never heard that phrasing before. Maybe I have been under a rock.
I well remember when I was around junior high age (early 1970s) and some groups were pushing the idea that violent television shows caused violence IRL. It was bullshit then, and it is bullshit now.
Johnson catman:
You need to immerse yourself in Discworld. (Terry Pratchett.)