The Trigger for Violence

Dear Editor,

I recently read your site's article “The Link Between the Rise of Violence and Horror Films”, and felt a strong need to counter the, frankly, outrageous claims that violence in slasher films are the catalysis behind real-life killings. The author, Olivia Puck, that you've chosen to promote has a reckless disregard for reality, and her attempts to sensationalize the issue at hand need to be properly addressed.

The claim that fictional violence motivates individuals to commit acts against human life is not only an insult to the audience’s intelligence but also a flagrant display of ignorance. Fictional violence is just that- fictional, and separate from the sadism found within our society. Believing that a viewer can transition from being a passive observer of dramatized violence to an active participant in real-life brutality oversimplifies the complexities of the human psyche. Have I ever skinned a human being? Would admiring special effects make me successful in that act? Success would require real-life experience, training, and research— far too many variables to blame a film alone.

It takes no effort to look into Mrs. Puck, and see that through her job history she has held positions at several previous publishing companies, including a copy editor position for Picket, a paper infamous for its part in the Locke v. Shaw defamation case. This leads me to believe that this article was written as yet another biased attempt to fearmonger. If this topic is as serious to the author, as she has lead us to believe within her introduction, then I put to question why she would not detail to the reader how the data she referred to in her secondary statement, “There is an upwards trend of children engaging in video games with a rating of Mature, or higher,” (Puck, paragraph, 5.), was NOT found to have a direct link to acts of violence in juveniles. Following the data to the Michigan Health and Sciences in Youth group, you can clearly note how despite an increase in violent media consumption, there is in fact a decrease in reports of violence perpetrated by a minor over the last decade. This, as concluded by Dr. Budman, can be attributed to an increase of counseling programs made available to children across the country both in schools and community spaces.

A sound argumentative essay would acknowledge this data and use it to advance the discussion. If the issue isn’t with children who have access to care programs, then who is committing these acts? Puck fails to compare conflicting data points and instead cherry-picks information to create a misleading narrative. This so-called research linking violent media to real-life violence is a tangled web of dubious claims and questionable sources, seeking to vilify an art form without understanding its nature. Humans are shaped by genetics, social experiences, and environments; suggesting that a single entertainment source shapes behavior ignores these facts.

Real-life violence has different motivations than fictional violence. Violence in the media we consume is not senseless; it follows a narrative pre-determined by a publishing group in order to further the plot, a character’s growth, or the profitability of the product they are producing in the first place. In contrast, real life violence is not so premeditated, even when it is. You can delve into the true motivations of an aggressive individual and still not understand every small detail that led to the act. There is a reason why people continue to be morbidly fascinated by those found guilty of extreme acts of cruelty, and attempt to dissect their entire lives and behaviors in order to see into their psyche. Domestic abuse, mental illness, peer pressure, or a fascinating link to previous trauma.

These are not answers, and rather speculations that are as baseless as the sources in your article. But they’re easy.