A paper by two University of California economics researchers, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, suggests that violent movies may be doing their bit to lower crime. (The two unveiled their findings at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, held, fittingly enough, in New Orleans, which crime stats recently re-confirmed as the murder capital of the United States.) It's always struck some as an iffy supposition that violent fantasies might warp the minds of those whose minds weren't already inclined at least a little in that direction. At the core of Dahl and DellaVigna's argument is the simple enough idea that violence is most likely to be committed by people of a violent nature, who are already prone to enjoy seeing make-believe violence done unto others. Therefore, the more time these charmers spend watching violent movies, the less time they're going to be out looking for heads to bust. As Peter S. Goodman summarizes in The New York Times, violent movies attract "would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs. Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead." Or, as Professor DellaVigna puts it, “It’s not as if these people watching violent movies would otherwise be home reading a book.”
It could be argued that there is an element of class snobbery in the professors' attitudes, which seems to put a lot of weight on the assumption that the audience for slasher pictures and action flicks is made up disproportionately of mean blue-collar drunks in wifebeaters. (On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want to swear on a Bible that a Jean-Claude Van Damme festival would be the worst place in the world to find a bunch of blue-collar drunks. You know, I'm just sayin'.) Its reasoning also moved one "expert", a member of the Parents Television Council, to use the technical term "somewhat goofy." At least the profs can't be accused of trying to rationalize their own leisure time viewing; Dahl "recently purchased a DVD player that strips out brutal or sexual images" and says of violent movies, “I don’t like how I feel when I watch them.” He doesn't let his own kids watch them, either. If it turns out that the professor is raising his own little pack of Visigoths, he won't be able to say that he didn't warn himself.
