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Ways in Which the Media Has Desensitized People to Violence Essay

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As I sat in Alexander Hall at Invitation to Excellence, I looked around at the faces as the segment from The Dark Night played. I was struck by the faces of the students in the room—some were amused to an extent and the others were nearly expressionless—as they watched Batman pound The Joker’s head onto a table. The thought “how has the gore of movies desensitized our culture to the violence around them?” ran through my mind as I watched the students, products of our culture’s repugnant media.
Statistics show, according to the American Psychiatric Association, that by eighteen years of age, an adolescent in the United States will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence. These figures are staggering. It would help …show more content…

The other day I was at a local grocery store. I saw two men looking through the sale bin of movies. As I watched, one man picked up one movie and began reading the back. “…PG-13 for rape scene,” he read and then looked at his friend and said, “It should be a good one.” What kind of perverted mind would think that a rape scene makes a movie “good”? The same mind that has been subtly taken captive by a nihilistic entertainment industry that tries to convince its consumers that violence is pure amusement.
This bloodshed-saturated culture ridicules the importance of life itself by making into something we laugh at for our own entertainment. When My Bloody Valentine came out last January, I had several friends that went to see it in theaters. Many came back after the movie saying that they laughed throughout the entirety of it and thought it was very funny. A movie in which a man kills twenty-two people is found humorous and people try to say that there is nothing wrong with the amount of violence being shown. Value is robbed from life when someone can kill ten or twenty people in the movie and still be a likeable and fascinated character. People have become calloused to what death and pain really mean. They have taken movies as a removed from reality; however, they are only it is only beginning to effect this world where violence has real consequences.
In the military, assassins are trained by forcing them to watch murders

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