“We have nurtured a culture that supports violence,” said Kalamazoo Violence Prevention Educator Amy Foster.
With over 5 years of experience in her job, Foster has come to realize that movies, music, advertisements, and media are constantly glorifying violence.
People believe that the annual number of murders is increasing, but according to Journalist’s Resource, United States homicide rates have actually been steadily declining since 1991. Although, it’s true that murders and willful killings still result in over 15 thousand deaths per year.
Is there a way to prevent these horrible deaths from happening? I don’t think so. But we can stop glorifying these events. We can stop making movies in which all the heroes have to kill someone to be considered heroes. In the past, heroes used to lock people up when the villain did something horrible.
Directors are putting more violence into superhero movies because films that haven’t had big battle scenes with the entire city destroyed have been reviewed as boring. People now need the violence to enjoy a movie. The plot of a movie now has to have a battle scene of some sort, where the antagonist is fatally or near-fatally wounded.
Season 4 of the “Walking Dead” came out in October and it has continued to increase in popularity. It’s one of the new trends and happens to be pretty violent. Now I don’t have anything against “Walking Dead,” it’s one of my new favorite shows, but it’s another example of society favoring and leaning toward the violent.
When the series started, you cannot say that you didn’t flinch when walkers came out of the blue, people were bitten or blood and guts were covering the TV screen. As I continue to watch the show the things that used to make me jump or flinch are the same things that I just kind of shrug off as normal now. Shows, movies and games are desensitizing us to what violence really is.
I have come to realize that the most popular magazines, stories and shows are also the most violent. For example, “Grand Theft Auto 5” (GTA V) has recently come out and just as recently broke a big record, selling enough video games to make over one billion dollars in just three days. This game has ramped up the graphics making the violence in it even more gruesome.
Video game reviewer, Will Shanklin said “GTA V” has “superb HD graphics, much better voice actors and top-notch animators combine to make scenes of torture and murder that much more grizzly.”
It’s not just the sight of violence that makes our society desensitized. The music that our society listens to isn’t any better than our movies, shows or games. In a type of music called Death Metal the lyrics are all about worshipping Satan, killing people and small animals or being killed.
We seem to be surprised when horrible things happen in our world but to cope and mourn we watch movies, play games and listen to music that all support that violence that we are mourning.