If Movie Violence Caused Shootings, We’d All Be Dead

It’s fair to say that most sane, right-thinking humans who live in the United States have been living past their mental breaking point for years when it comes to the nonsensical lack of constructive debate about mass shootings. I don’t know if other Americans, when pressed, could name the specific moment they just threw their hands up and accepted that we live in a world ruled by ghouls like Wayne LaPierre and Omar Mateen. For me, it came on April 20, 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School in Colorado. I was in high school at the time and watched as the grownups all freaked out and then proceeded to do … nothing much, besides elect George W. Bush president and then stack Congress with a bunch of people who let the 10-year, 1994 federal assault weapons ban expire in 2004.
The suggestions we’ve heard from our fellow Americans about how to prevent mass shootings run the gamut from the logistically ridiculous (like arming the same teachers who most Americans seem to loathe), or willfully indirect (like vague notions of more mental health care, which Americans have time and again shown an unwillingness to fund). One of these fruitless lines of inquiry has remained a favorite old standby, however: It’s those darn violent movies and videogames that are to blame!
Something as subjective as the level of violence in media is, of course, hard to empirically measure. Studies about the link between violent or aggressive behavior and having viewed or interacted with violent media have vacillated between one conclusion or another for years now.
One thing that really hasn’t vacillated, though, is the overall rate of violent crime in the United States, which one criminal justice professor said in 2016 has been “dropping like a rock” for the past two decades and now resembles the level it was at in the 1960s, according to FBI crime statistics. The occasional uptick from year to year hasn’t reversed this precipitous decline.
And over the same period of time, have our entertainments become more wholesome? Late ’80s or early ’90s fare like Die Hard or Terminator 2 seem downright quaint compared to the gleeful ultraviolence on display in recent years. The body count in either of those movies barely runs into the double digits, yet we may note, thanks to a disturbingly thorough breakdown by one graphical artist, that 112 mooks met their firearm-related deaths at the hands of Keanu Reeves’ impeccably dressed hitman before we even get to how many were victims of vehicular homicide or death by pencil.