Our hearts go out to those who were killed or who lost loved ones in the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This grotesque crime demands that liberals finally take responsibility for the culture they have created and largely control.
However, in what may be a new low in liberal cynicism, rather than expressing sympathy for the victims and those who lost loved ones in the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary --, and taking an honest look at how this crime came to occur -- Democrats are saying they must “exploit” the tragedy to enact new controls on guns.
Yet, these same liberals who are demanding new gun controls adamantly deny that the Hollywood-created culture that drowns children and the mentally unstable in a toxic brew of violent video games, violent movies and pornography has anything to do with creating the mental state that can lead to such tragedies.
According to The Parents Television Council, by the time an average child leaves elementary school, he or she will have witnessed 8,000 murders and over 100,000 other acts of violence. By the time that child is 18 years-of-age, he or she will witness 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders. One 17-year longitudinal study concluded that teens who watched more than one hour of TV a day were almost four times as likely as other teens to commit aggressive acts in adulthood.
The media report that Sandy Hook murderer Adam Lanza spent a lot of time playing video games also seems to have sparked no comment or introspection from the entertainment industry whatsoever -- even after the tragic April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, which pointed to the Columbine killers' similar fondness for first-person-shooter video games and the eerie similarities between the murders and certain violent films began to emerge.
Even more cynically, despite mountains of evidence that thousands of dangerously mentally ill people are living on the streets, liberals demand that the “rights” of the mentally ill be respected and they have made it virtually impossible to require unstable adults to get mental health treatment unless they commit a crime.
President Jimmy Carter forced many government-run mental health facilities to shut down and emptied many of those being held in state and other mental institutions onto the streets. The plan was to create community health centers where the mentally ill could receive outpatient treatment, along with residential facilities for those unable to make it on their own. As author Mike Nichols observed, “Needless to say, the plan failed miserably.”
The rights of society to protect itself or even simple compassion for the families of the mentally ill, who fear they might commit a horrible crime without help, don’t figure-in to the liberal calculation of whose “rights” must be respected.
The entertainment industry makes billions from drowning our culture in gratuitous violence, and Hollywood’s liberals put millions into the campaigns of President Obama and Democrats in Congress.
It should come as no surprise that rather than take an honest look at the corrosive effects of violent entertainment on children and the mentally ill, they have cynically decided to call for more gun control, rather than address the real problem: the entertainment industry’s creation of a generation of young adults who think that seeing 40,000 murders by the time they are 18 is normal.
