As a clamor over gun shows waxed in stately, to-the-manor-born Connecticut this weekend, the byproduct of awkwardly contrived stabs
at what passes for reasoning in Liberal Middle-earth, a single thought popped into responsible minds of real Americans all across the amber plains of our cherished American Heartland.
Where’s the move to shutter
theaters showing violent films out of respect for the victims in Newtown?
Hollywood had killer thrillers screening in Nutmeg State multiplexes as that tragedy was being played out, Tinseltown is still brandishing
Roscoe-packing Palookas at your neighborhood bijou right now tonight, and more Loogans,
they’re bragging, lousy with filmdom’s kind of trouble, will be out queering the
nation’s fettle soon. Like this week or
something. Those dirty rats haven’t even stopped
filming this bunk or releasing this bunk or developing this bunk or anything.
The insensitivity in that is mind-numbing.
Though motion picture moguls put a lid on the
kind of relevant industry data that would otherwise finger the scope of the
problem, your MacDougal Post staff is comfortable estimating that theatergoers
in the U.S. and Canada witnessed at least 6.5 billion murders on the big screen
in 2012 alone*, and there’s no way we can begin to come up with numbers for that
damn TV in your living room.
Now we like to see bad guys get it as
much as anyone, and understand that bodies have to pile up in order to make
them out as so evil they just gotta be plugged, but, folks, there has to be a limit. Clearly, that point lies somewhere before 6.5
billion lives being seen snuffed by the moviegoing family members of North America.
Something like maybe one plugging a decade would seem to suffice here. On a per theatergoer basis, that would still
amount to something like 1.3 billion murder viewings, averaging out to 130 million a year.
So business dries up out there by Hollywood and Vine, and some hams
go jobless. Hey, join the club. If what have to be awful, awful people,
judging from the product they’ve been giving us anyway, need to find another
line of work, so what? To stop
desensitizing killers to killing is worth any price. And losing Hollywood would probably end up becoming a huge plus.
Whatever stepped in to take its place
couldn’t possibly be any sicker.
*
Estimated 2012 movie theater attendance of 1.3 billion times an average of 5 whacks per cinematic presentation.
