On our last skills development seminar we were given an article about the German government considering outlawing paintball after a school mass murder. It wasn’t the first time, as I recall, when German politicians were acting very funny; it’s about obvious that they just don’t care what they are going to ban to reassure the public after such an incident and before the elections. But then, we were asked what could be done about those mass murders performed by students, and I guess there are some things definitely to be banned, thinking about prevention.
I’ve found two major problems regarding violence in entertainment, but I’m not sure which one is the more dangerous. The older one is the issue of popular action movies. In order to sell them year after year, you have to make the action more violent, the gory scenes more authentic, and the murders crueller. The same level of violence just won’t work for too long. What won’t change is the fact that the audience still aren’t allowed to try what they’ve seen, however cool did it seem. It generates aggression for sure, and after a certain level, some kids will be more or less unable to control it.
The other problem is the astonishing illiteracy about firearms, nourished by popular movies and video games. In a typical one of the latter, in half an hour of game play you get shot, let’s say, two hundred times. It would take about three to ten bullets to get yourself killed, but you can replenish health by using med kits, so you may get shot unlimited times without dying; which is truly ridiculous in a graphically realistic environment. No wonder if kids think that with a sub-machine gun in your hands you get invincible.
On the contrary, playing paintball, the very-very first thing you are going to learn is that you will be shot and you will be incapacitated, however smart and agile you are. Paintball could be an ideal of shooting in entertainment: it concentrates on discipline, punishes aggressive behaviour (nowadays there are usually no fully automatic paintball markers either), and generally enforces sportsmanship.
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