And Now A Quick Huzzah For The Short-Term Benefits To Society Of Violent Crime

There’s an interesting piece by the ever-lovely Nadine O’Regan (right) in the Sunday Business Post about the correlation between of on-screen violence and real-life violent crime – or, we should say, the apparent absence of any correlation. Quoth Nadine:

“[I]t came as an absolute delight this week to read the results of a new American study, which suggests that films like the bloody but brilliant No Country for Old Men and Eastern Promises might be – far from what the doomsday psychologists have prophesied – exactly what people need to keep them away from dangerous behaviour of an evening. According to the figures in the survey, in the last decade, screenings of violent films in the US have decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend. ”In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime,” Gordon Dahl, the study’s co-author, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, has said. Dahl and his co-author, Stefano Della Vigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, are not claiming that violent films are never a problem – they make clear their studies do not address the long-term effects of exposure to violent images.”

For the full paper, jump on over here …