Violence Then And Now – It’s Not The Same

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – In my neighborhood, when we ran around and fired a cap at one of our friends, their head didn’t explode.  I could not then go and ransack the profusely bleeding corpse for what may have remained on the person.  You really think that a kid running around with a cap gun is the same as toting some sort of assault weapon around and popping rounds into the heads of people on the screen to watch the blood splatter all over the place and get a thrill out of it? Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

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Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Let’s try Jason in New Mexico.  Jason, you’re on The Mike Church Show.  How are you?

Caller Jason:  I’m well, how are you?

Mike:  I’m good, thank you.

Caller Jason:  I wanted to comment, this is very much like the SWAT teams developing because it was too dangerous to knock on somebody’s door and say, “Come on out.”  Now they have people busting down the door.  The drone is just some sci-fi method but it doesn’t change the principle of the argument.  How long before the SWAT team starts saying, “We might lose somebody going in there.  Let’s just shoot them”?  Why deliver that warrant?  Let’s just shoot them.

Mike:  Yeah, that house looks like it’s a compound.  Just blow it to kingdom come.  We’ll count the bodies later on and find a couple shell casings in there.  That’s enough to acquit us.  Of course, somebody is going to say, “We don’t have people like that serving in our military.”  You wanna bet?  What about the PTSD people that we have still serving that are coming home and the tragedy from Sunday of turning weapons on their own friends?  The fact that we’re having these —

Caller Jason:  PTSD is scary, but I think that’s a method to disarm the military once they come home.

Mike:  What about all the kids that are sitting out there today that are in front of those video game consoles, practicing exactly what Cap and Jonesy —

Caller Jason:  What about all the kids that grew up watching Howdy Doody and walked around with a six-shooter on their hip?  What about the picture of a little boy being embraced by Kennedy while he has the six-shooter on his hip?  What would happen today?  I think the video games are a generational difference and a red herring.

Mike:  You’re saying the video game is the fake shooter?

Caller Jason:  Yeah.  I think the video game is the same thing as the western used to be.  There’s a famous picture where there’s a little boy and he has his western six-shooter on and he’s being embraced by Kennedy.  There’s no chance of that happening now.  You make a finger gesture and they throw you out of school.  Every little boy grew up with their cap gun.  We didn’t have the problems that we have today.  The cap gun is just in digital form because everyone is looking at a screen instead of running around.  I don’t believe in this problem with the video games.  It’s no more violent than the imaginations of the cowboys v. Indians games that went on —

Mike:  Jason, forgive me, sir, maybe I’m just not understanding here.  In my neighborhood, when we ran around and fired a cap at one of our friends, their head didn’t explode.  I could not then go and ransack the profusely bleeding corpse for what may have remained on the person.  You really think that a kid running around with a cap gun is the same as toting some sort of assault weapon around and popping rounds into the heads of people on the screen to watch the blood splatter all over the place and get a thrill out of it?  Really?

Caller Jason:  I think it’s exactly the same.  If you look at the violence that was evident in the cartoons at the time, the Tom & Jerry or Roadrunner or Wyle E. Coyote, whether it’s cartoon or not, it’s the same violence that was going on.

Mike:  So Moe slapping the other two Stooges is the modern equivalent of people being blown into millions of little pieces in video games?

Caller Jason:  I didn’t talk about Moe.  How many times did you see the Roadrunner blown up?

Mike:  I don’t recall the Roadrunner being blown up and strewn all about the desert, do you?

Caller Jason:  I really don’t see a difference between the cap gun and the violence of that versus the video games today.

Mike:  Maybe we should have more of them.  Maybe in the video game you ought to be able to use a nuke.  It wouldn’t be any difference.  Maybe you should be able to exterminate or incinerate entire villages all at once because we can do that with our cap guns, too.  I remember taking entire villages of Indians out with my little six-shooter, don’t you?

Caller Jason:  The nuke is what ended the cap gun era.

Mike:  What ended it?

Caller Jason:  The atomic — as soon as people got into the sci-fi and the nuclear age, cowboys and Indians were somewhat plain.

Mike:  I don’t agree.  As a matter of fact, I don’t know how anyone could ever make that ridiculous of a statement.  The two are totally incompatible.  The two are so far removed from a similar activity.  Jason, I don’t know if you remember this.  The first shoot ‘em up games after your cap gun — by the way, you can still find those at the store.  They still make them.  The first antecedent for the cap gun that I recall were some of the games they still have today like Duck Hunter where you would shoot what looks like a cap gun.  There were actual cap gun-looking guns that you would fire at certain video screens in early versions of the game.

Just to give one example, Natural Born Killers is the very close cousin of The Magnificent Seven, or to say that The Magnificent Seven is in the exact same genre that the recent Expendables movies are, I think, is totally ridiculous. They’re not.  [mocking] “Mike, you didn’t have those kinds of special effects.”  I don’t think the enjoyment of the act of carnage was the principle point behind watching The Magnificent Seven.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I haven’t seen it in a while and need to rent it and watch it again.

End Mike Church Show Transcript