That's of course a valid point (although you left out heavy metal, sex in movies, Elvis, waffles, the ACLU, and France) and this is almost as disgusting as the fact that murder happens so often - people would rather further their own agendas than actually find the problem.
Ketshy, I love education as much as anyone else, but going to a university and not seeing crazy fuckers is like going to a titty bar and not finding skin. You can't educate people to not be fucked in the head (oh, how they've tried on me, and for nothing), so there's got to be a better solution.
I don't blame video games or movies for violence, or sex, or what-have-you, but the way we actually view violence in America is certainly fucked - I think the connection is reversed from what the anti-entertainment fundies go off about. Frank Zappa once remarked that there were more love songs than anything else out there, and if people did what the music told them to then we'd all love each other, and I think he hit it dead on. Now, rather than assuming that violent entertainment makes people prone to violence, or as Zappa warned assuming that love songs made people love each other, let's go the opposite route - how about looking at the way people who are in love or like being in love listen to love songs, and the way more violent people enjoy violent entertainment, and analyzing it from there?
America is known for being one of the most anti-sex 'advanced' nations around, and our entertainment certainly reflects it - Grindhouse was originally NC-17, and to bump it down to R they removed not the violence or the language but the sex. The Dreamers, a film about an exchange student in France featuring nothing worse than a little language and a lovely body, got an NC-17 while the snuff film that was The Passion wound up with R. I guess that our mentality goes more along the lines of 'if we can't fuck that ass, we'll shove a rocket up it', and our entertainment succeeds or fails accordingly.
Any takers?
Jeff
