Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Letter to the editor:

We’ve become a culture of violence

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With enough news and opinion to go around for the next year or two, one wonders, is there any viable solution to the seeming epidemic of gun violence in which thousands of Americans are killed each year?

What measures, if implemented, could staunch the flow of blood in our nation and recognize the cruel irony of the National Rifle Association’s call for yet more guns?

The apparent answer: none. The U.S., it seems, has become permeated by a mainstream culture of violence.

A good example, besides those predictable video games and the morphing of boxing into “ultimate fighting,” is the success of the film “Django Unchained”: one bloody episode after another until almost everyone has been beaten to a pulp, whipped, blown up, shot up, tortured, mutilated or savaged by dogs.

But that’s not the most disturbing aspect of this “culture.” During the most violent and sadistic episodes, the theater audience saw reason to laugh.

Legislation to mandate sharper background checks and banning the sale of automatic weapons represents a noble effort to treat the symptoms of this problem but not the root cause, possibly incurable in the present day.

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