If it feels like gun violence in PG-13 movies has gotten more frequent lately, well, that’s because it has.
Between 1985 and 2012, scenes featuring gun-related imagery more than tripled, according to a new study headed by Daniel Romer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. They found that back in 1985, PG-13 movies featured on average less than one scene of gun violence per hour. By 2012, that figure had jumped to nearly three such scenes hourly.
In an interview with Reuters, Romer expressed some concerns related to the increase in onscreen violence seen by many teens, noting that a PG-13 rating doesn’t tell parents very much about a film’s content. “The problem for parents is they can no longer rely on the PG-13 rating to tell them there isn’t a lot of violence in those films,” he said.
Romer is also concerned about the influence such depictions of violence may have on impressionable or unstable adolescents: “It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out there are going to be disturbed kids who are going to see this kind of content,” he said, adding that past studies indicate a link between witnessing gun violence onscreen and having more aggressive thoughts.
Dartmouth University professor James Sargent, much of whose academic work has focused on how media influences young people, says that the new study should be a catalyst for the Motion Picture Association of America to reconsider how it rates films. “[They] need to go back to the drawing board and fix their rating system so those movies are rated R for violence,” he told Reuters.
“We have a problem in this country,” he said. “People are shooting each other at high rates. We should be trying to address anything we can to decrease the rates of gun violence in the United States.”
I think Sargent and Romer are on the right track here with regard to soberly assessing and weighing the possible influence of such onscreen violence upon those who witness it—especially when it comes to young viewers—as well as suggesting that perhaps the MPAA needs to rate violent imagery more strictly. With virtually every mass shooting, it seems there are invariably connections to violent media, be it movies or video games or music.
And while no one can indisputably prove that violent media causes those tragic rampages, the fact that it’s nearly always in the mix should give us pause before blithely dismissing the possibility that the violence we’re increasingly seeing in movies—even PG-13 movies—may be playing a supporting role in making our society a more dangerous place.
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