Pond James Pond
New member
I don't know. Do you? Are there really solid studies supporting that hypothesis? Are there studies contradicting that hypothesis?
Interesting. With my example above you claim not to know, yet in the news report you confidently dismiss it, even though the premise is much the same: that exposure to violence can beget violence. Most obvious difference? The latter involves firearms.
In any case I've found studies online that point to children exposed to violence later being more likely to be violent themselves and I've found reports of how people who have served in war-zones show higher levels of violent behaviour once back in regular society. So it would seem that exposure to it, can make it more likely.
That's one for Glenn.
He's touched on the question --
My reference to video games was to highlight the irony that though I've repeatedly seen people attribute violence causing traits to video games on TFL I don't remember those notions ever being resisted as enthusiastically as this topic has been.
Personally, I've seen video games more as a release of tensions rather than a cause of them, but that is only my personal experience of playing them after a crappy day at work...
So if the problem is "violence," how do you keep are area "clean" of violence, other than incarcerating violent people? And we know that current trends are heading away from incarceration of violent offenders, not toward more incarceration.
So what's left? Ahhh -- that's when "violence" suddenly (miraculously) again becomes "gun violence," and the epidemiological "solution" is to clean the area -- of guns. Which, of course, are not and never have been the problem, but they make a convenient scapegoat and whipping boy.
Yet, if incarceration is the response it is because the offence has already happened: prevention fail.
Did you watch the video? The talk was not about amnesties, gun control laws at all. It was about community members acting as mediators and negotiators for their community so that when they hear of situations developing. And, according to the interviewees it worked. No whipping boys.
To be frank, you're turning this into a gun issue, not the video.
Again, are you so against this because it is something Antis have talked about?
Just because they want to use it to move onto guns, it doesn't mean that the initial premise that violence is a social behaviour that can influence the behaviour of those exposed to it is automatically false.
Now letting or preventing anti-gun folks then exploiting that to their own ends is a different story.
Watch the video and note what the last speaker talks about: during his experiences in gang culture he had witnessed one altercation that had, with the resulting tit-for-tat reprisals eventually almost 1000 people died.
1000. From one argument.
Not worth trying to prevent? Using words and mediation? Seems worth a go to me.
Is violent behavior spread by casual contact or is more intimate contact required?
Watch the video.
If this was a study only about the City of Chicago and so noted, then it could be representative. On the other hand, if the sample is only from Chicago and applied to the US (and supposed to also be representative of cities like Amarillo, Boise, Jacksonville, Virginia Beach, Phoenix, ...) then it is a sham study and should reflect on the researcher and their ethics.
So, coming from someone who should know, there may well be something in it. We don't know that they didn't perform new studies in those areas, an even if they didn't that doesn't mean that the results in Chicago itself were not valid, positive and effective.
Unlike an actual disease, which simply is, violence is a choice. And it cannot be "cured" it can only be prevented, or it can be met.
Which is the entire point of the report. That, with people from the community intervening in a controlled way, the violence can be averted because the would-be actors choose not to escalate the situation.
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