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pat gilbert

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The violence meme is so ubiquitous I didn't notice it. I looked at this video and thought what irony then I thought man I'm as stupid as...

I was watching This Week with George Steponallofus, he had on as a guest Greta Van Susteren who made the comment that the source of the gun problem is us in the sense of we are a violent society. She pointed out the irony of the attached video. This is a meme that the answer is violence.

What I'm NOT talking about is the second amendment.
What I'm not talking about is the duh Pat violent video games or similarly trite comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hxRlpRcorEU#!

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    Gail . 50+

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    Jan 7 2013: Funny that you should bring this up. I was talking to my husband about this yesterday.

    Starting around Thanksgiving, TV was full of lovely non-violent movies. For more than a month, I didn't see a single person killed, beaten, raped, tortured, or maimed. OK, the actors weren't necessarily the best, an the writers were worse, but the themes of the movies were gentle and loving. They were all affirming.

    Then New Year hit and I can't watch a movie. They are all so violent. The violent commercials about them are back. Even when I watch a channel that a child watches, grossly violent commercials showing gratuitous violence are thrust at me. I have to watch TV with my remote in hand to change the channel, but I can only do that after the damage is done. These commercials often start out with a murder.

    We DO live in a violent society. But it's more than that. At the core of this violence is fear. We live in a fear-driven society, which brings about a "consequence" of violence.

    The fear is instilled in us by our parents, our educators, and our religious and political leaders Most people don't even know that fear is irrational. They don't know what it means when someone says, "the only thing to fear is fear itself". But fearing fear doesn't mean to back away from it. It means to walk through it and see how powerless fear is compared to its alternative (peace).

    to you, Pat, I say that Jesus said "fear not" and "be not afraid". That's because the alternative to fear is great power. Peace is how one enters the kingdom of heaven from whence all power flows.
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      pat gilbert 50+

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      Jan 7 2013: That saying came from FDR so I would take it with a grain(large) of salt.

      My point is that the meme is that violence is the answer. To solve something the ultimate answer is violence.
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        Gail . 50+

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        Jan 7 2013: Well, as a pacifist and follower of the teachings of Jesus, I do not believe that violence is the answer, so I guess there's no going on from here. I guess I misunderstood your question.

  • george lockwood 20+

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    Jan 7 2013: If it were so simple as to outlaw guns or pass a law or whatever it would be one thing. But cultures just seem to have a set-point for murder. Americans seem to be sort of mediocre. Worse than Europeans lower than Mexicans. Very average.

  • John Smith 30+

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    Jan 6 2013: "If violent video games make violent people then why am I not in the NFL yet?" was tweeted by a player of the video game Madden NFL (an American football video game). It was Micheal Moore who closed this debate 11 years ago, but some people didn't notice. He argued that violent media don't really separate the United Stated from Europe, Canada East-Asia and Australia, regions that are much more peaceful, but what did separate the United States was a culture of fear, a siege mentality as well as being an unusually stressful society where people take pills just to get through the day, where people get squeezed for every last dollar and where a car accident can leave you homeless if you don't have top-notch health insurance. Thinking that violence in games, movies and books (wait, not books, judgmental old people read books, so we mustn't say books do anything bad) cause violence is the same warped thinking that religious patriarchs employ when they blame rape on the socially liberal victim and not the socially conservative rapist who was taught that women who show ankle deserve to be "punished". When the media say a young male shooter used to play video games it's like saying he used to eat breakfast in the morning, it would be more suspicious if he didn't do it. The ultimate hypocrisy comes when people claim movies and games influence people more than holding actual firearms with actual lethal bullets while shooting at living animals or targets with human shapes.
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      pat gilbert 50+

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      Jan 6 2013: Where I stated "What I'm not talking about is the duh Pat violent video games or similarly trite comments." That is what I meant, your post is irrelevant to what I'm talking about.
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