Short Argumentative Essay, Draft 2 toward Violence Step by Step

There is an emerging understanding that there is no correlation or causation between exposure to violent media and aggressive behavior. Hal Hinson (1995) is one of the advocates of this emerging opinion, and in his article " In Defense of Violence " he claims that movie violence cannot cause anything other than enjoyment and catharsis as long as the morality of the viewer is not corrupted (p. 292). Anderson et al., in their article " The Influence of Media Violence on Youth " , and in " Academic Achivement " on the other hand, claim that entertainment violence leads to aggressive and violent behaviors, particularly in children. They state that even if people who are exposed to media violence do not explicitly act aggressively, the likelihood of such behaviors increase over time. I believe Anderson et al.'s claim that exposure to media violence causes legitimization of violence through desensitization refutes Hinson's morality arguments because it argues that people get used to violence, unconsciously and unwillingly, regardless of their moral values. Hinson (1995) acknowledges that eighty two percent of Americans think that there is too much violence in the movies but he claims that the continuous success of R rated movies contradicts this statistic (p. 289). Therefore he argues that although people deplore violence in real life, they like violence in art and that is why violent movies make so much money (p.288-289). Anderson et al.'s (2003) desensitization argument might clarify this contradiction. Their example of the Cline, Croft, & Courrier research that found negative correlation between adult viewers' exposure to violent scenes and sensitivity to them, explains why it doesn't bother us to watch mass murderers and rapists in action (Anderson et al., 2003, p.96). We believe that the violence we watch is not excessive because we get used to it and become unresponsive to it over time. However we still think that violence that other people or our children watch is dangerous without realizing that it is the same thing.