Is there any way to legislate against the culture of violence?

[reformist2]

I know it strikes at the heart of everyone's 1st Amendment sensibilities, but if there were a way to use legislation to reduce the public's appetite for gory and violent "entertainment," I'd be all for it.

[riverwalker]

1. we could start with television

the garbage our culture indulges in. All the programs are CSI type crime shows, with murders, rapes, torture, autopsies, grisly crime scenes.

[reformist2]

2. I think you get what I'm getting at. So much of what's on TV is gross, morbid, twisted.

I've actually never sat through one episode of CSI. The way they start every episode with a bloody dead body turns me off. I have to wonder how it affects kids who watch this kind of thing, week after week.

[Kei7777]

3. Why is your first reaction to something like this to throw away our first ammedment rights?

Is this still the 50's for Christ's sake?

[reformist2]

4. It's not my first reaction, but I'm not against soft-censorship of some entertainment.

We have a tradition of restricting pornography, and for good reason. I fail to see why we can't have similar laws for all this blood-and-guts entertainment.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. Violence is the key

We had the same kind of guns in the hands of civilians ever since the end of WWI, yet we did not have the level of violence.

Whether its games, movies, other media (hip hop...) is hard to tell, but something clearly has changed.