Preliminary Reaction to: "Guns on the Screen: A Failure of the Liberal Imagination?"

In a recent post, Adam Gopnik discusses an argument "on the other side" of the current debate about gun control, which he considers "worth taking up."  According to Gopnik, the argument is that gun control would be ineffective here in the U.S., because we have a "culture of violence expressed in movies and television shows and ... violent video games." He emphasizes that "[t]he correlation between observed violence and actual violence is very poorly established" in studies.

He nonetheless suspects that, a hundred years from now, historians will not pooh-pooh the connection, but will instead say something along the lines of: "Americans were obsessed with violence; they fetishized it and glorified it, loved to watch it; and that American culture of spectacular violence took many turns. Often, it was a symbolic turn, occasionally a sublime turn—expressed in many extraordinary works of art—and inevitably that conception of violence as high style, serious style, of nihilism as a test of meaning, infected the rest of their lives."

There are two passages from the post that I found particularly interesting.  Here's the first one:

The costs of censorship are real, and not in any way comparable to the costs of gun control. This is in part because ... there’s no reason to believe that censorship works, while there is certainty that gun control does.

Comparing the costs of censorship to the costs of gun control is certainly intriguing, and I'd love to see that idea more fully developed -- considering both the economic cost and the psychic or moral cost of enforcing such measures.  (I am thinking specifically about the actual costs of attempting to "control" or limit gun violence on-screen, versus the actual costs of attempting to "control" or limit guns in real life; not about the social costs of failing to control them.)

On the economic side, I get the sense that effective gun control might actually cost a lot of money -- it would presumably (among many other things) involve massive law enforcement efforts to pry guns from the hands of criminals, not just those who who happen to legally own guns under current laws.  But perhaps prohibiting or censoring violence in films, television, video games etc. would cost a lot of money as well - particularly if directors, producers and actors do not "cooperate."  (I feel quite certain that First Amendment enthusiasts would put up the kind of fight that Second Amendment enthusiasts do.)  

And I wonder whether some gun control enthusiasts may underestimate the psychic or moral cost of undermining the Second Amendment; there is at least an argument that disarming the populace at large is a way of leaving the citizens entirely at the mercy of their government.  The theory would seem to go something like this: Agreeing to give up our guns is a step toward creating a culture in which we learn to think of ourselves as sheep rather than proud, independent citizens; and that is the first step toward tyranny.

The second passage that caught my eye is this one:

What I think we need to do, and need to do clearly, is to see that the question of cause and effect is a little misplaced in this debate. The reason we don’t want our kids—or our teen-agers, or ourselves for that matter—lost in violent imagery ...  is not because of something that they will cause but because of what they are right now. It’s not what they might do it’s who they are in the act of becoming. Fictive or not, violent images increase the sum total of violence in the world. If we believe that we, as Edmund Burke said, should hate violence and love liberty, then we can’t hate violence and still make it part of our idea of pleasure.  ... It may not get anyone killed but it creates an environment in which killing becomes normalized, theatricalized, accepted—just one more thing that happens.

I think he's onto something here, and yet I think he stops just shy of saying it directly.  Surely the missing word or concept is empathy.

To the extent that we grow accustomed or inured to violence on-screen, I would think this tends to stunt our capacity for empathy.  And that can have a lot of implications even for people who never encounter a gun in real life.