Pirate's Cove

Here’s Joe Nocera writing an op-ed for the NY Tomes, The ‘Die Hard’ Quandry, in which he’s really, really concerned

Later this week, the fifth installment of the “Die Hard” movies is scheduled to open in theaters across the country. “A Good Day to Die Hard” stars, once again, Bruce Willis as John McClane, a too-stubborn-for-his-own-good cop who has to stop a highly trained army of bad guys out to wreak destruction and death. It will undoubtedly be a giant hit for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the owner of the “Die Hard” franchise.

Oh, that’s why, due to News Corp being the Big Company putting the movie out (Twentieth Century Fox). No one at the Times was particularly concerned about the other extremely violent movies, such as Django Unchained, but, if it is a Rupert Murdoch owned movie? Concern!

That’s a lot of “Die Hard.” Among the guns used — and used, and used, and used — in just the first “Die Hard” are a Steyr AUG assault rifle, a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and a Walther PPK pistol with silencer. McClane himself relies on a Beretta 92 semiautomatic pistol in the first three movies, and a Sig Sauer P220 in the more recent films. (He also favors the bald look in the last two movies.)

Most of those guns are already banned for private ownership as long as they are automatic. Silencers are against the law. And I guess people who are bald are supposed to be scary, mean, and violent.

But, in all fairness, Mr. Nocera does bring his Fox Derangement Syndrome to an end (mostly). One thing he points out is that the MPAA is more concerned with language than violence (and think about this with the Die Hard franchise: the movies do tend to be cartoonish in regards to people getting shot. Boom, dead, no big bullet holes, no big screams, barely any blood from being shot) and that Hollywood doesn’t want to take any responsibility

…“There is tons of research on this,” says Joanne Cantor, professor emerita of communications at the University of Wisconsin, and an expert on the effect of violent movies and video games. “Watching violence makes kids feel they can use violence to solve a problem. It brings increased feelings of hostility. It increases desensitization.” Every parent understands this instinctively, of course, but those instincts are backed by decades of solid research.

When it comes to those who will truly act on the violence they witness and become extremely violent themselves there are typically other risk factors.

There is a second reason many people — indeed, many of the same people who would like to ban assault weapons — shrink from demanding changes in the culture’s tolerance for violent images. To do anything about it legislatively would likely violate the First Amendment. Just as an assault weapon ban is the slippery slope for Second Amendment advocates, efforts to restrict violent images — or pornography, for that matter — is the slippery slope for First Amendment absolutists.

Well, yeah, but what Mr. Nocera misses is that most of the people making the games, movies, and TV shows with massive gun violence tend to vote Democrat and donate to Democrats, hence, left side agitators who have no problem infringing on the Second Amendment won’t attempt to infringe on the 1st. Now, if the people making the violence were mostly on the right, the Lefties would be pushing for “common sense” legislation which “respects 1st Amendment Rights”, ie, censorship. They have no problem doing this with religious rights right now.