America the Stupidiful

It seems like everyday we have a violent shooting here in the US...a few days ago it was Memphis and the Wendy's, before that it was a town hall committee in Missouri, before that it was the NIU shooting, before that it was Virginia Tech. It really doesn't seem to stop, does it? And you know none of the politicians currently in office or on the campaign trail seem to have any solutions for it. No, you wouldn't want to tighten up restrictions on gun ownership with all this shit happening, would you? Oh of course not, it's America and violence and random shootings are to be expected.

Yet the prostitution busts still continue. You'd think with a country in serious peril over this huge wave of senseless killings they'd spend more time cracking down on real criminals. But the cops want to make their jobs as easy as possible and prostitution arrests are easy for them. No gun-toting angry men to deal with, no hard work, just a few words exchanged and they have a bust. it's almost pathetic that these people are put out there "to serve and protect" yet by busting an erotic masseuse or escort in a hotel room they are serving and protecting nobody.

Just think, if all the money that was wasted on setting up prostitution stings was put towards trying to prevent these random shootings and killings we hear about every day, this country might be in a better place than it is now. Just a suggestion, though, as I know the two are not really correlated to one another. After all, prostitution is not a violent crime and the violence happening in our country is symptomatic of a society that encourages and promotes violence. How can we stop it? Well, look around.

Believe it or not, I put some of the largest blame on the film industry. We are constantly inundated with horrific violence and shootings in films, and the perpetrators often go unpunished. Young men (and it's always men) see these films, think the characters are "cool" and want to emulate what they see on the silver screen in person. They're too dumb to see that it's fantasy. All these young guys that worship Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese films just can't get beyond the fact that the whole gun thing has been tired out. They want to re-create the same old crap they see, to further perpetuate the cycle of violence that's plaguing our society.

As someone who works in film, I see it every day when I work on the low-budget independent films that help to pay my bills. Every hot-shot Tarantino wannabe has got to have a shooting or some guns in his crappy little film so it will look cool, without realizing the consequences of the message they're promoting. And yes, these same film dorks are the same people that tell me they would never work on a porn shoot "because they have morals." They tell me not to tell people I've worked on porn because it "might compromise the jobs I get in the future" if anyone finds out. Oh, so that movie I worked on where the girl got raped and the guy got shot was ok, but two people having actual consensual sex onscreen is clearly not. Or how about the gaffer who I asked about renting equipment from the other day who said he wouldn't even rent out his equipment to a porn shoot because "that's where he draws the line." Well apparently films with excessive violence were above that line because he'd worked on plenty of those!

Obviously, there's a lot of causes to violence, not just film and media, but we could go on and on about it. The problem is that we're a nation of gun-happy prudes who get get all excited over the most extreme forms of violence and still get all hot and bothered over anything overtly sexual. Grow up, America. I have morals. It's the rest of you violence-obsessed, gun-toting, war-lovin', so called holy rollers who don't.