More sex in your violence?
From the rocket-propelled grenade that shoots down a police helicopter to the punch in the face delivered to a former friend, the depictions of realistic violence in the newest "Grand Theft Auto" video game are raising fresh concerns. And gamers can’t wait to play.
Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since. School violence has also gone down. The U.S. Secret Service intensely studied each of the 37 non-gang and non-drug-related school shootings and stabbings that were considered "targeted attacks" that took place nationally from 1974 through 2000.
The Secret Service found that there was no accurate profile. Only one in eight school shooters showed any interest in violent video games; only one in four liked violent movies.
On the other hand, reports of bullying are up. Our research found that certain patterns of video game play were much more likely to be associated with these types of behavioural problems than with major violent crime such as school shootings.
For many children and adolescents, playing video games is an intensely social activity, not an isolating one.
When I watched the game, I caught one sequence that would seem sure to prompt outrage -- your character gets falling-down drunk and can, if he wants, steal and then drive a car. The scene is undeniably fun and funny. Admittedly, the humor is low-brow, more in the tradition of "Jackass" than of Oscar Wilde, but it's still fun; like much else in the game, it's the thrill of discovery, the sense of, "Whoa, I can't believe I can do that!"
Of course, that'll be exactly the sentiment of the game's detractors: Can you believe they're letting children do that?! This has to be illegal!
Well, actually, nobody is letting kids play this game. It's rated M, which means it's for sale to people 17 or older. Kids will still get it, of course, just like they also get hold of R-rated movies and all kinds of perversities on the Web.
But nobody -- at least nobody sane -- calls for movie houses to refuse to play R-rated movies just because kids might sneak in. It's hard to see why the policy should be any different with video games.
Al Sharpton, center, stands with friends and family of Sean Bell. Bell was shot 50 times by New York City police on his wedding day. The three detectives involved were acquitted of manslaughter last week.
Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to "close this city down" to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.
Al Sharpton is back in the news with his vow to close New York down to protest the acquittal of three police detectives in the death of Sean Bell. The AP story somehow omits to note that two of the three NYPD detectives against whom Sharpton now seeks to lead his lynch mob are are black. So far they have been protected from the likes of Al Sharpton by due process of law.
Sharpton's long career as the race hustling leader of lynch mobs is one of the continuing disgraces of our public life. How is it that Al Sharpton has assumed this position of leadership in matters allegedly pertaining to race? Though he is accorded an absurdly respected role in the Democratic Party by politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he is easily one of the most vile men active in American public life.
When I first heard the news, I was so angry that I was unable to think of anything but retaliation. Where should we riot? What can we destroy? Who can we hurt? Like many people, I craved the sense of power, however ephemeral, that is produced by making our enemies hurt the way they’ve hurt us. Even now, as I make an unequivocal call for peace, a huge part of me wants to see somebody pay for this egregious miscarriage of justice.
The problem, however, is that reactionary violence doesn’t help. All the rioting and looting in the world will not return Sean Bell to his wife, child, parents, and friends. Destroying police cars will do nothing to stop the next detectives from seeing unarmed black bodies as a threat that warrants lethal force. Inflicting bodily harm on the three officer-assassins will not prevent the next judge from ignoring the evidence and ruling in favor of an arrogant, white supremacist, proto-fascist police state.
Although I understand what we shouldn’t do, I am at a loss about what we should do. How do heal from this latest tragedy? How do we achieve justice for Sean Bell and his family? How do we prevent the next senseless murder from happening? How do we fight back?
Which one will say "uncle?"
Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV. But the sport often derided as "human cockfighting" is branching out. The bare-knuckle fights are now attracting competitors as young as six-years-old whose parents treat the sport as casually as wrestling, Little League or soccer. Is this a good thing? And what does our love of violent entertainment say about us?
A decade ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other legislative strongmen had choked the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) into near-submission. Nearly 40 states banned mixed martial arts events. The cable industry, over which McCain exercised considerable influence as the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, took note too. In 1997 TCI and Time Warner stopped carrying UFC pay-per-view events on their systems. Semaphore Entertainment Group, the company that produced UFC, nearly went bankrupt.
When he attacked the UFC, McCain never pushed for reform; he wanted to eliminate it entirely. But despite its initial image of lawless, bone-crunching mayhem, the UFC ultimately proved quite capable of policing itself. Apparently, the public’s interest in the fights was not as base as McCain had perhaps imagined. Today, the UFC is a sanitized, bureaucratized, more genteelly marketed version of its former self, yet it’s also more popular than ever. As much as we like violence, we apparently like it even more when it’s tempered by a senseof order.
I appreciate the rules that have taken mixed martial arts fights from pure brutality to true sport. The rules are fairly straightforward -- no gouging, attacking the groin, manipulating small joints, kicking an opponent when down, that sort of thing -- and don't get in the way of good action, as overly aggressive rules in amateur boxing and other combat sports sometimes do.
As a lapsed boxing fan, tired of the talent drain, corruption and long-term health effects for the fighters in that sport, I'd welcome a sport that provides that same pure one-on-one competition without the problems that have all but killed boxing. I'm still not sold. The legality of hitting -- though not kicking -- a man when he's down still makes it look a little back alley for my tastes.
Put those taser parties on hold.
The number of violent crimes reported nationwide appears to have fallen modestly in the first half of 2007, signaling the first notable decline in violence in two years, the FBI said yesterday.
How did a bunch of liberal Democrats in Denver successfully institute New York-style policing reform, with overwhelming support not just from homeowners and the business community, but from poor minorities who live in blighted neighborhoods? Policymakers found that, when vitriol or demagoguery did not drown out the voices of ordinary poor and minority residents, they said that they wanted safe neighborhoods, and for the city to use tactics that experience showed would work best to protect them from the tyranny of lawlessness.
Other cities - New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston - are experiencing a steady decline of murders per capita and higher arrest and prosecution rates for those who perpetrate violent crime. They attribute their progress, in part, to something that San Francisco does not practice - accountable forms of community policing with targeted violence prevention programming.
Community policing is a comprehensive, neighborhood-based violence prevention and intervention practice that is carried out by law enforcement, city departments and community organizations. Coordinated resources are aimed citywide, but in high crime areas in particular. Foot patrol is only a small feature of community policing.
Dr. Lecter will see you now.
Are movies like “Hannibal” and the remake of “Halloween,” which serve up murder and mutilation as routine fare, actually making the nation safer?
Every prediction of social disintegration proves to be untrue, but each new medium or entertainment form is viewed as unprecedented and therefore not bound by the old (disproven) predictions. Popular novels were attacked as social dangers in the mid-19th century, but by the late 19th century you have critics saying, "These so-called 'comic strips' aren't like the wholesome popular novels of our youth, which did so much to encourage literacy."
Freedom-of-speech folks — they come from both ends of the political spectrum — say it's a violent world, and movies that decline to comment on that sad fact are bad art. They will also point out that very few people who see films like "Death Sentence" feel compelled to take the law into their own hands. Some minds — dangerous minds — are like dry tinder. The right act of violence in the wrong R-rated movie can be all the spark such an individual needs. Of course, it also helps to live in a country where handguns are plentiful.
