Reverse Psychology

IT HAS BEEN widely reported in the media (what isn't widely reported in the media?) that the young man who killed twenty eight people, including himself, was quite a viedo game addict, and spent hours each day in his mother's basement, violently gaming:  black ops, and so forth.

Nothing is cited as a cause of our epidemic of  random shooting sprees as much as american culture in general, violent games, movies, and TV programs in particular. It is widely considered to be the root cause of the problem. The NRA recently joined in the attack on mainstream violent culture, keeping attention away from real guns in the hands of real people.

Now it has been suggested by dallas lawyer and student of american society norton rosenthal that quite the reverse may be true. All the violent culture may be the only thing, or one of the only things, keeping potential shooting spreesters away from the real action.

Last year the U.S. Supreme Court made mention, in one of its rulings, of the fact that no study has ever been produced positively linking violent images in popular culture with violence in the real world.

Is it really possible that all this vicarious violence is a social palliative, a soothing salve providing an outlet for internal agression, gently drawing off tension, keeping folks in their basements and off of the streets, making america safe (well, almost).

Instead of violent culture making violent people violent who start shooting sprees, maybe the opposite is true; violent society ( divorce court, parental alienation, asperger's syndrome, bullying) creating violent people, who, sooner or later, despite the angry energy being constantly drained away through vicarious entertainment, will reach a limit, and will explode, violently, if pushed far enough by the circumstances of their lives.

Maybe the root problem of our ongoing american orgy of violence is not so much vicarious violence in entertainment, but rather, violence in our personal lives, our anger with each other, our divorces and lawsuits and grudges and lingering unresolved resentments from bygone days.