Liam Day tries to find a connection between the events at Chardon High and the things young boys watch every day.
Act of Valor, the new movie starring not professional actors, but active duty Navy SEALs, was released in theaters last weekend. It is alleged that on Monday T.J. Lane walked into Chardon High School outside Cleveland and shot five students, killing three.
Let me state at the outset: there is no causality. At least none we know of. What I wonder, though, is whether there is correlation? For in the wake of the tragedy I’m forced to ask myself: Is a society and a culture that produce Act of Valor also more likely to produce T.J. Lane?
Act of Valor certainly isn’t the first war movie ever made. Nor will it be the last. I think what separates it from its generic brethren is its intended audience.
Since their emergence during the 50s as a distinct demographic, middle class American adolescents have been a focus of advertising and marketing executives eager to separate them from their disposable allowances. Hollywood is no exception. From Rebel Without a Cause on through Breaking Dawn, film studios and independent producers alike have understood the gross potential of teenage audiences.
War movies on the other hand, have, perhaps somewhat curiously, skirted this demographic. From the films of Audie Murphy and John Wayne on through numerous depictions of the war in Vietnam to more recent films like Jarhead, war movies, from the jingoistic to the pacific, have almost universally been made for adults. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and I suspect that’s only because he is an adolescent.
What, then, has changed? For, whatever else might be said for it, Act of Valor is clearly intended for and has been marketed to an adolescent and immediately post-adolescent male audience. In addition to a handful of Super Bowl spots, its marketing campaign targeted video game players. And why not? What is Act of Valor but a film extension of the popular video game Call of Duty? I suspect it’s only possible to make the movie in the wake of the game’s popularity.
Therein lies the correlation with Monday’s horrible events. I suspect the shooting at Chardon High School is also made more possible in the wake of Call of Duty and Gears of War and Grand Theft Auto and all of the other games whose primary purpose is to let gamers shoot digital images, alien and human alike.
I don’t know if T.J. Lane was a gamer and I won’t expound here on the research linking violent video games to increased aggressiveness in particular personalities, but past school shootings, most notably the one at Columbine, were linked to the games the perpetrators not just played, but obsessed over.
Tom Matlack has elsewhere on the Good Men Project written eloquently about the impact of wars on the men and, increasingly, the women who fight them. They are to be acknowledged. They are to be honored. I’m just not sure they should star in movies packaged to sell war to adolescents.
Despite the genuine need for physical security in an age of terror, America is not and should never be Sparta. Democracy is diplomacy and war should never be cultivated as part of it. When war arrives, it should be imposed, not sought and we, as a state, should respond out of necessity, not desire. For all the maudlin reverie that too often threatens to engulf the Greatest Generation, the one thing I believe can be said for its members is that they did not seek the challenge that shaped both their individual lives and their collective place in America’s history.
Linking entertainment, whether movies or video games, with martial virtue strikes me as, perhaps not dangerous, but reckless. The young men who watch the movies and play the games have not yet developed the executive function to regulate their impulses.
As I said at the outset, there is no causality between what happened Monday and the movie released into theaters only three days earlier, but, as a society, I think we’d have to be blind to miss the correlation.
—Ap Photo/Mark Duncan
wet suit You are correct as to the demographics of juvenile mass shooters. Not so much as to the adult mass shooters–Ft. Hood, Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, for a couple of examples. However, your question was about total gun deaths. Mass shootings get the ink, but they are a small fraction of the total. The old race canard is a statistical issue, see the FBI crime report and the National Crime Victim Survey. In addition, the FBI does its best to fudge the figures. If a hispanic is a victim, he is listed as a hispanic. If… Read more »
And before you pull out the hoary old race canard (it’s all black ghetto violence etc. etc. etc.), why is that mass shooters like Dylan Klebold and his buddy and this dude, seem to represent more “mainstream” America? Granted, whats his head in the mass university shooting was Korean (or something other than caucasian), but it seems like a lot of mass shooters are white. Why is that? It isn’t crime that drives them, as they weren’t born and bred in the ‘hood.
Do tell…
The fact remains, Canada has a far far lower rate of gun violence than America. Why that is, I do not know. Could you explain it to me?
As well, Europe has an even lower rate of gun crime than Canada. Can you explain that to me?
Something about American culture, whatever it is, encourages all the gun violence and mass shootings that are seen far more regularly in the U.S. than in either Europe or Canada. Why? We play the same games and watch the same movies (if not the same TV). What accounts for the difference?
wet suit. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. You’ll note beggars mostly walk. If we pass a law…. Like we did against booze, way back. Or drugs currently. Or drunk driving. So, we’ll have guns with us. Question is…what now? Belleisle, who wrote Arming America, got his ass handed to him as a liar and fraud. Lost his job, lost his awards. But first he was the toast of the gun-grabbers and even cited in case before the Supremes. John Lott, who wrote More Guns, Less Crime, suffered a different fate. His critics predicted blood in the streets, the… Read more »
The Obama administration inspired a lot of Americans to massively stock up on guns and ammo. It is easy to track the postal zones where those guns went. Violent crime rates have been going down in those areas. The connection is that there is no connection. Here is what I would suggest to Canada. If you tomorrow repealed all your gun laws nothing about crime or public safety would change in any measurable way. As long as all guns had to be kept completely out of sight, gun-haters would not even feel uncomfortable. It is that way in Texas. A… Read more »
Guns tend to arouse strong emotions and so I think it is wrong to overlook that by being excessively rationalistic about them. OTOH, In the late 1990s there were some bad school, and resturant mass shootings in Texas, the UK and Australia. The later places pushed their already strict hand-gun laws to maximum strictness which was a complete ban on private ownership. They were told that good things would happen; that life would be safer. In Texas, for the first time ever, a pathway was created whereby the most law-abiding citizens could legally carry a fully concealed handgun in most… Read more »
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America:_The_Origins_of_a_National_Gun_Culture Until I read the above, I have no take. First, let me confirm, is that what you’re talking about? If by “Arming America” you mean the stat that there are more guns than people in America (I have no idea if that’s true, but I understand that it is true of Texax . I know that more Americans are shot and killed annually than are killed in a number of other countries. Why, I don’t know, but I imagine it’s a combination of availability of guns and culture. Culture is a whole lot of things, but availability is pretty… Read more »
Wetone.
What’s your take on “Arming America”?
As for relevant correlations, go and read Stephen Pinker’s book on human violence and cruelty. Learn the actual FACT that we are IN FACT a violent, cruel, savage and bloody species. That’s just the way it is. The fact that we’ve gotten the level of violence and cruelty in society down to the level it is today is the amazing fact. Not an outbreak of standard human nature. I know that the know nothings will come on here bleating that humans are all Care Bear (TM) like and cute and cuddly, but the fact is we’re not. The Holocaust, for… Read more »
Or movies for that matter. People just aren’t that stupid. Some might get an idea or two, but seriously, that’s like 0.5% of the incident. A whole lot more goes into it.
Anyone who seriously believe that violent video games can lead to mass shootings needs their heads examined.
Moore’s “Bowling” had a couple of items he had to retract. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, a significant number of Americans lived on farms. Not big big one-crop farms where everything they grow goes to the elevator. Farms in which much of which they ate was home-raised, in addition to what they sold to market. Which means they’d seen animals, large and small, some they’d known for years, some just weaned, slaughtered. By hand. “Hand strokes” as Keegan said in Face of Battle. Then gutted, bled and pulled apart for dinner. You kill such animals by hitting… Read more »
I think the bigger issue here is not what young men watch for entertainments sake, but they way they are taught to resolve conflict and express pain. If male video game players were shooting up schools and then saying things like “Well the games got boring, and I had to get my kicks somehow…” then there might be an argument that violent entertainment (and video games in particular) were somehow related to real life violence. The facts are however, that most school shootings perpetrators have been systematically hurt – socially, emotionally, or physically – and have found no protection from… Read more »