Mass shooting in Las Vegas. 50+ dead

[Rev. Rye]

Good flick. Maybe Hollywood should stop making so many movies that glorify violence before its actors and directors, like Quentin Tarantino for one, take a vocal position against guns. Same with the gaming industry. Stricter legislation against violent content from Hollywood and the gaming industry.

I dont see how that would do anything. People who already have psychopathic personalities and a tendency towards violence, are going to be encouraged by anything to eventually act out. If it isn't movies or video games, it'll be something else. You can't compare movies to weapons, because the weapon is what they use to kill people, not the movies.

It might inform the method, but it would require something else for someone's reaction to go from thinking "Hmm. That was interesting to see,"  to "I've got to make this happen in real life," namely a messed-up mind or some really extreme circumstances.

Interesting thing, over a month ago, I rewatched Dragnet on Hulu. There was one episode where Joe and Bill had to deal with a college student obsessed with "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier," a novella by Gustave Flaubert. The tale involves a boy with a talent for killing animals who grows into an adult who ends up killing his parents in a blind rage, and eventually ends up atoning and ascends into heaven as an old man, having proven he's moved beyond his youthful sins. The student eventually kills two coworkers. He gets arrested in the library, reading aloud from Rimbaud for some reason. The librarian asks Joe Friday: “Do you think Flaubert was the reason?” Joe replies: "“Not the reason, just the excuse.”

Catcher In the Rye is one of my favourite books, and it's what I took the "Rye" in my name from. It gained a reputation as the assassin's favourite book after two murderers of celebrities and a failed presidential assassin name-dropped it. Namely, three incidents gave it a reputation for inciting violence. Meanwhile, it sells about a quarter million copies per year (the most widely quoted statistic, likely a bit low); by that metric, it's sold at least 15 million copies (other sources claim it's sold over 60 million). Any attempt to dismiss the book as some sort of manual for assassins simply has to reckon with that the vast majority of people who've read it have no interest in using it to justify violence.

And it's the same exact thing with films, even with the most violent. Most of the people who watch them have the ability to tell fantasy from reality. And the particular film I gave a shout-out to earlier in this thread, A History of Violence, goes out of its way to show the unsavory aspects of violence. Viggo Mortensen fulfills the particular "good guy defends himself from a bad guy" fantasy, but is only successful at it because it turns out he's from the Philly Mob. And he's the kind of mobster who can be so vicious that he can scare even other mobsters. Then, when he does a repeat against Philly mob enforcers, it tears the family he spent the last 20 years building up apart. And the movie ends with him killing the rest of the Philly Mob (which is evidently fairly small) largely because he knows it's the only way he can stop the cycle. When he comes home, it's tense, nobody speaking to each other and it ends with him sitting down to dinner, nobody knowing what's going to happen afterward. The actual violence is done in a way that's best described as ruthlessly practical (not even showy) and the aftereffects (from the gore to the effects on the killer's psyche) are heavily dwelled upon.

TL;DR: Focusing on violence in cinema is a poor dodge that won't really help anything. Of course, I'm not even sure that gun control will help that much. See David Wong's attempt at trying to find a common thread in multiple massacres between November 2015 and August 2016 and finding the standard narratives political pundits make (Left and Right) fail spectacularly at all of them.