Film at 11 3/3

In part three of my thoughts on the Sandy Hook massacre, I take on the media. It’s a popular scapegoat and fuel for the fire. 

‘Movies and video games made me violent’ is one of the most pathetic excuses for committing a crime I’ve ever heard. It’s like blaming McDonald’s for making you fat. Unless someone pulled a Se7en and made you stuff your face, it’s your own damn fault. No character from Grand Theft Auto jumped out of the game and made you shoot the owner of the 7-11 you robbed.

TV, movies, and video games are not directly responsible for violent crimes or violent people. The culture surrounding them, however, is questionable.

Did you know in order for a movie to have a PG-13 rating, it cannot show realistic depictions of gunshot wounds? If you want to show an accurate amount of blood, guts, and gore, it’s an automatic R rating. I think that is an astonishingly backwards system. It desensitizes kids to violence and its consequences. 

Another fun fact about the movies is that the number of thrusts in a sex scene in some sappy love story will contribute to the NC-17 versus R rating. And oral sex on a woman? No matter how romantic, it’s not appropriate for a wide audience. Seppuku in a murder for morality tale is less likely to get you an NC-17 than a realistic sex scene in a love story. That’s fucked up.

What is a more natural part of being human? Killing for sport or two people consummating their love? According to a board of censors, sex is more damaging to teenagers probably already having it than shooting ‘em up.

I’m not a gamer but if I picked the top 10 selling games of 2012, how many require violence to play? How many have more violence than story? How many parents ignore the ratings on the games? How many clerks selling them? Video games are an international pastime that consume hundreds of hours of people’s lives. If you see and do something often virtually, how long until it has an impact on you actually?

Violence is becoming a primary form of entertainment in this country. How many gun massacres happened in the age of musicals? Michael Moore said that in his movie Roger & Me he showed a man getting shot and a woman killing and skinning a rabbit. People reacted more strongly to the death of the rabbit. 

I watched this movie for a film class and realized he was absolutely right. No one, myself included, so much as blinked when the man got shot. It was nothing we hadn’t seen a hundred times over somewhere else. Watching the skinning of the rabbit, the whole class moaned, groaned, and flinched. It was not something we saw too much of. Again, what’s a more natural part of being human? Killing and skinning game or shooting another person?

The news media is no better. A quote erroneously attributed to Morgan Freeman says that people need to remember the names of the instead of the killer. If the media stopped treating these shooters as pseudo-celebrities, maybe we’d get luck and the next one will just off himself rather than taking a dozen people with him. I don’t know who said it originally, but it’s a great point.

Most people can name the Aurora movie theater shooter but how many people can name his victims? The shooter’s name was all over news broadcast for weeks but how many times in those stories did you actually hear the victim’s names? Without Google, how many victims from Aurora, Sandy Hook, and/or Virginia Tech can you name? I couldn’t get out of single digits.

How many of these sick bastards wanted their 15 minutes? What would happen if shooters like this stopped being household names? These men are not rock stars. They are mass murderers. Their names do not deserve public remembrance. The media and the people need to stop giving it to them. It may not solve everything but it will certainly stop a few people.

Creating a culture of violence happens when small things add up to big things. We can’t undo it all at once but small changes can hopefully lead to big changes. I’m starting be refusing to remember the name of the man who slaughtered children. Instead, I’m going to remember Victoria Soto. I wish more people were like her.

Current Jams: Dirty Laundry by Lisa Presley 

Shoot from the Hip 1/3

Unless you’ve been pulling a Unabomber, you are well aware of the tragedy that occurred in Connecticut. It is heartbreaking and devastating that something like that could happen. However, if an event that horrific were ever going to take place, it would have been in America. Rather than do one super-long blog, I’m breaking it up into three parts: gun control, poor mental healthcare, and the role of the media.

It hadn’t even been a full 24 hours before debates about gun control popped up all over the internet. The inclusion of poor mental health care followed soon after. The shooter obtained his weapons from a family member’s home. The only reason he didn’t purchase his own was because he had the wrong paperwork.

After the sick son of a bitch used an assault rifle to mow down teachers and children, people flocked to gun stores to arm themselves. This is absolutely part of the damn problem!

Having a gun in either situation wouldn’t have saved lives. It would have gotten more innocent bystanders killed by untrained individuals who wanted to play hero. Unless you’ve got a 100% accuracy rate with a concealed and carry (which most law enforcement can’t tout) you are no match for an assault rifle. You’ll just get more people killed.

Australia had a horrific gun massacre in the 1990s and immediately enacted stricter gun laws. It hasn’t happened since.

Americans didn’t do much of anything after Columbine to regulate and control gun sales. Since then we’ve had Virginia Tech, the Aurora Movie Theater, the Oregon mall, and now Sandy Hook. And that’s just off the top of my head. Feel free to add ones that I missed.

I have said this to gun owning friends of mine and they all agree with me. Guns should be as regulated as driver’s licenses. You must take and pass a mandatory gun owner’s education class before you can legally own a firearm. Different guns would require different permits and assault rifles (which no civilian can ever justify) would require a special security clearance. In order to sell from owner to owner, you must present your firearms license. All guns owned must be registered and registration must be kept up to date every X years. Failure to do so will result in a fine.

If you own firearms and don’t keep them in a safe, lockbox, or locked display cabinet, you deserve to be shot by your own weapon. If you can’t store them properly, you shouldn’t have them at all. If you don’t properly clean and care for them, you deserve a painful misfire.

I have no respect or tolerance for irresponsible gun owners. NRA members who know what they’re doing and know their limits are better than the guy who knows nothing but buys a .22 for ‘home protection.’ Most of my gun owning friends knows that starting a firefight with an armed maniac is a Darwin Award level of stupid. Whether everyone remembers that in an emergency is another disaster waiting to happen.

I find killing people with guns cowardly. It’s distant and it’s easy. If you think you’re ‘bad’ enough to murder somebody, you should do it so you can see the consequences of your actions up close and personal. I find nothing heroic about murdering someone with a knife or sword but it’s less cowardly than doing it from 100 feet away.

The NRA nutbags have already started to come out of the woodwork insisting that any and all gun control is unconstitutional. How deep in denial do you have to be not to see the statistics, the devastated families, and the river of blood running through this country? If you say “You can pry me gun from my cold dead hands” I say snack on a bullet because being deaf, dumb, and blind to what’s happening is getting more and more people killed every day.

Current Music: The Howling by Within Temptation