[GPSCC-chat] Guns

[Caroline Yacoub]

I'm with John on this one.
Caroline




________________________________
From: John Thielking <pagesincolor at yahoo.com>
To: "sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org" <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>; Brian Good 
<snug.bug at hotmail.com>
Sent: Sat, January 19, 2013 10:54:25 AM
Subject: Re: [GPSCC-chat] Guns


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.pdfthat
 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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