Our Culture of Violence

I would like for you as a reader to do me, the writer, a huge favor: go to CNN.com and type "mass shootings" and see how many come up in the US. There are 71 mass shootings to date. Now go to a website called infoplease.com and type in "mass shootings" and see how much information comes out. There is a time line for mass shootings on that website too. This basically describes that lately we are experiencing a lot of violence in the US. Violence basically became part of our culture. People make jokes that "you know you are in New York when babies are not afraid from gun shots!". Movies, TV, Ads, News, Books, Games, Comics, all had some sort of violence in it and lately it has been even more gory violence: SAW I,II,III and IV, Kill Bill I, II, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and the list is endless. Not only that but it has stretched to the mind of our youth with all these video games that have unbelievable amounts of violence which is correlated with the mass shootings in schools and colleges. Even the News that we watch on television has a lot of violence. According to Rocky Mountain Media Watch, " Violent topics comprise 40 to 50% of all of the air-time devoted to news. Violence basically became something we can not escape from.

But what can be the cause of all this violence that has been rising lately? Could it be the lack of education? the terrible parenting? mental illness? the high availability of guns? the media? the internet? the alienation of youth? music? All of these combined? There is no doubt that there is an alarming rate of violence in our nation and some of this violence include an alarming rate of mass shootings. There is also no doubt that the media has contributed to this violence. According to Rocky Mountain Media Watch, "events portrayed on television news have generated copycat crimes, including mass murder, terrorism, hijackings, workplace violence, hate crimes and suicide." Not only that but the succession of school killings in the US are themselves examples of copycat events. Simply put, violence attracts people's attention and the Media loves that attention but more important are the alienated people sitting at home who watches that killing someone might make them famous and might make the world notice them and therefore they go out and kill.

Let us look at that time-line from infoplease.com:
- 02/14/08: Gunman kills 7 students and himself in Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, IL
- 02/08/08: Nursing student shot and killed two women and herself in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
- 02/02/08: Gunman kills five women in a mall in Tinley Park, IL
- 10/10/07: 14 year old student shot and injured 2 students and 2 teachers before killing himself.
- 09/21/07: College freshmen, shot an wounded 2 other students.
- 04/16/07: 23 year old student killed 32 people before killing himself. (Most deadly rampage in US history)

There a lot more of other incidents but let us concentrate on those and see what does the information tells us. Firstly, there has been three mass shootings in one month which is February, 2008. Secondly, many of these shootings occurs in colleges or schools. Thirdly, the killers are usually young men. Last but not least, there has been too many killings in one year but some people seem to not notice or choose to not notice and ignore.

Another thing that is alarming to me is that I am worried that we became sadistic as a country. I am worried that we got to enjoy other peoples' pain. It became sometimes even funny. If you disagree look at the revenues of the movie SAW which is according to Wikipedia. org received, in the US, more than $285 million. Not only that but SAW III gave Lions Gate Entertainment, most commercially-successful independent film distribution company in the US, its highest-grossing weekend in history, outdoing the previous record set by SAW II. Sure, critics will say that it is a form of entertainment. But, few hundred years ago, they had this roman tradition where they had men fighting each other and animals to death and they also called it entertainment. I mean, what kind of sick entertainment is it to watch someone killing themselves or others for the pure sadistic pleasure of the viewer? I am sorry this is not entertainment, it is sadism and it is also becoming part of our culture.

The question then is what can we do? In a previous article. I explained that we need to concentrate more on the education of our youth. We need to have longer school days and incorporate more reading in their curriculum. We also must lower the dose of violence in our media and that should be enforced by the federal government. We need to alert our viewers of the harmful TV effects. We need to grow up and learn to have a real "Gun control". We need to forget our cowboy days and stop this ridiculous ideas that we have to have a gun. Yes, I agree guns don't people and people kill people. But, people kill people much easier with a gun and a semi-automatic because if they were walking around with a knife it would be really difficult to kill a lot of people at the same time unless they are all paralyzed in bed!
Violence must be stopped.