[GPSCC-chat] Guns

Sat Jan 19 10:54:16 PST 2013

This is not a trivial issue (guns).  I'm not sure if I sent the following article to the list or not.
This is from my web site www.peacemovies.com, which has had the homepage replaced with a 1 year anniversary of the SOPA strike page until next Thursday in solidarity with Aaron Swartz who committed suicide last week because he was indicted for 13 felony counts carrying a maximum 35 year sentence for simply downloading a few million articles from a pay per view site for free.

John Thielking 

What Does Gun Violence Have To Do With Movies?
by John Thielking
12-15-12

The massacre in Connecticut this week has left people devastated and some are looking for answers. Does boycotting violent movies (or realizing that there are nonviolent alternatives available) offer any hope of creating a mandate for change/gun control/ poverty elimination? This author says an emphatic Yes!

A recent debate with Steven Argue brought up the fact that there are two sides in the debate over whether violence in movies and video games significantly increases violence in the real world. Jonathan L. Freedman wrote a report published by The Media Institute (a movie producer funded outfit) located here:
http://www.mediainstitute.org/PDFs/policyviews/Freedman-TelevisionViolence.pdf that tries it's best to debunk the notion that violence in movies is significantly associated with violence in the real world. He claims that as little as 28% of the published studies on the issue show a positive correlation. However, while he is good at criticizing the other side for doing sloppy science (such as not being able to eliminate experimenter demand effects and achieve a perfectly double blind experiment that uses violent and nonviolent movies), he himself neglects to do a formal meta-analysis of the entire set of studies that he is reviewing. If there are 28 studies with 100 subjects that show a positive correlation while there are 72 studies with 10 subjects that do not, then it is quite obvious that the balance of the evidence shows a positive correlation. 
On the other side is Craig A. Anderson PhD of Center For Study Of Violence of Iowa State University, who has his own vested interest in that his career depends upon him continuing to find problems with violence in movies re: violence in society. In his latest work (written by a panel of experts from the organization that he heads), available here:
http://www.israsociety.com/pdfs/Media%20Violence%20Commission%20final%20report.pdf
it is claimed that no less than 3 formal meta-analyses of the possible correlation between violence in media and violence in the real world show a positive correlation. In that same paper the panel writes that while there is a positive correlation between media violence and increased indicators of violence in experimental trials, this does not translate into as strong a correlation between media violence and criminal activity. That is a different level of violence not addressed by most of the studies.
The bottom line is this: A 2009 on the street survey of what kind of movies people want to watch showed that 1/2 of the people want to watch a nonviolent movie, 1/2 the people don't care one way or the other, and only 2 or 3 people out of 35 want to watch a violent movie or seek out violent themes such as horror movies as their favorite. In light of the latest school shooting in Connecticut, it seems that one route to diminishing gun violence is to make sure that the box office receipts match the survey results. If that ever happened, all the politicians would start running scared every time someone wanted to start a war or if there was any kind of gun violence anywhere in the USA. Every trick in the book would be thrown at the problem until it was solved. Not all of the problem has to do with gun control. Some of it has to do with income inequality and general economic insecurity. We should be solving those problems too. But we need something to signal
 that we have a mandate. If 75% of box office receipts went to movies such as Eat Pray Love and Dolphin Tale, we would have just such a mandate. Let's get cracking! 

--- On Sat, 1/19/13, Brian Good <snug.bug at hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Brian Good <snug.bug at hotmail.com>
Subject: [GPSCC-chat] Guns
To: "sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org" <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
Date: Saturday, January 19, 2013, 10:13 AM

I don't know the Green Party's position on gun control, but the lack of chatter on the issue here increases my confidence that that the issue is trivial and Obama's recent aggressive activity is a mere smokescreen so he can make his supporters think he's progressive even while he's caving in on social security and medicare.

My view about guns changed when I was living in my car for weeks and months  in the National Forests and in Manhattan.  My initial terror that some nut might attack me at 3:00 am turned out to be groundless--the only people who ever bothered me were streetsweepers who wanted my car moved so they could hoover the leaves up, and police in Chicago and NYC checking to see that I wasn't dying of a drug overdose.   I came to suspect that my personal security rested on the fact that only a totally crazed person would even consider bothering me because they had no way of knowing if I had a gun or not.  Thus I came to regard guns as peacekeepers.  

Yes, guns sometimes fall into the hands of nutjobs.  If some nut wants to kill a lot of people, many schemes are practical even without guns.  I was surprised recently to find my thinking echoed by a prominent South Bay peace activist who said that though he will probably never own a gun himself, 
he supports the 2d amendment.

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