#lethal violence

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Guilty of Manslaughter,” Toronto Globe. November 7, 1917. Page 21. --- Welland, Nov. 7. - Joseph Morabito, an Italian, for eight years a merchant in Welland, was tried yesterday before Chief Justice Falconbridge on a charge of murder. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter, with recommendation to mercy. He will be sentenced to-day.

[cathrinetina01-blog]

Humans Are Not Murderous Beasts | Pages @ bitbillions

[ikkinthekitsune]

I recently watched both Fullmetal Alchemist series for the first time, and I think both are actually really good examples of finding the balance, since the main protagonist REFUSES to kill, but there are plenty of perspectives on the subject and plenty of death/killing that is shown but not glorified. Some are more "clean" or "painless" than others (clean shot through the head, for example), but it's definitely there and yet not portrayed as something that's good, though sometimes needed. (1/2)

(2/2) Of course, FMA/FMA:B is slightly different since one of the major themes explored was violence/the cycle of violence and lethal violence as a solution to things. But still, I think it's a good example.

Addition: I think it might have something to do with how American creators/producers view their audience: cartoons and animated things are traditionally marketed towards children, and even things with PG-13 ratings are still toned down a lot in the blood/ugliness aspect. The little Japanese animation that I have watched seems to achieve that balance a lot easier than American animation tends to (in my experience), even American animation styled after Japanese anime (like ATLA/LOK).

Yeah, anime -- particularly FMA, as you said, as well as RuroKen -- definitely has some advantages in that regard, and anime’s willingness to aim at teenagers instead of children is clearly important to the differences in the ways that anime is able to present itself in comparison to western animation.

But I also kind of feel like FMA and RuroKen have different goals than the particular sort of western show under discussion, too.  Ed and Kenshin are two characters for whom avoiding lethal violence is relevant more because of how that sort of violence would affect them personally than because of how it would affect the world at large, and they each have allies who are entirely willing to commit that sort of violence in their place if necessary.

As such, I sort of have to wonder whether the issues that were bugging me are drawn from a specific dynamic in western animation where the author is trying to justify a rejection of lethal violence on the part of a uniquely powerful hero who can’t (and doesn’t even want to!) rely on allies to take care of the dirty work.  Maybe the dirty work in question needs to be kept nebulous in order to justify it not being done at all.  =/

[ikkinthekitsune]

combustionman replied to your post: I’m starting to wonder whether the big...

The arc on which superman vs the elite is based does a much better job of getting the point across

I’ve gotta admit, I was wondering whether the issue might have been with the animated adaptation somehow failing to realize how to take advantage of its rating to match its source material.

On the other hand, I think there’s a difference between violence that’s graphic and violence that’s designed to be uncomfortable, and I’m really curious as to how static visual media like comics can fully negotiate that. 

I mean, if you look at how a show like LoK makes violence seem unpleasant, ugly imagery is part of it, but much of the distinction between a scene that’s gross to look at and a scene that portrays a character in agony comes from voice acting and movement (particularly involuntary motion).  Timing is important too, and that’s much easier to manipulate when you can determine the exact amount of time that the audience is going to spend looking at something.

And that might not be a big problem if your goal is to gross your audience out with deliberate and wanton cruelty... but it seems inevitable that it’ll start to cause issues if you’re going for more nuance than that.  How effective could something like Ming-Hua’s death -- an unfortunate act of desperation -- be without voice acting, animation, and timing?  Could it be ugly enough to convince an audience that they’d prefer their role models not to do it?

It sort of feels like the sort of people who choose to portray the themes we’re talking about don’t trust the audience to take their side if proportionate violence is portrayed as what it is, so they either opt out of showing anything too unpleasant (since they don’t think it would do any good anyway) or focus on disproportionate violence that they know the audience will find disconcerting.

Because of that, unfortunately, core issues remain unaddressed.  It’s not hard to convince people that an idealist whose ideals allow for more suffering in the long run is better than a cynic whose lack of concern for innocents and willful cruelty towards adversaries causes immediate and unnecessary suffering.  But what happens if you introduce someone like Korra, who’s simply too pragmatic to pass up lethal tactics if they’ll end a fight faster (and almost certainly thinks that sticking bad guys in cardboard prisons is nonsense)?  I think there’s an argument to be made that there’s value both in having heroes out there reflecting higher ideals by showing that lethal violence isn’t necessary and having heroes who take a more pragmatic approach, but only addressing the least appealing extreme of the pragmatic side doesn’t do a great job in making it.  =/

[ikkinthekitsune]

I'm starting to wonder whether the biggest challenge stories about characters who are ideologically opposed to killing face is the resistance their authors have to showing how ugly that sort of violence inevitably would be.

A:tLA and LoK make for a great comparison in this regard.  A:tLA wants its audience to agree with Aang that killing is wrong, but when characters do die, it's as clean as possible -- Yue collapses (and returns as a spirit immediately after), Zhao gets dragged down into water by a spirit (and isn't actually dead anyway), Chin fell off a cliff (in a flashback), Professor Zei went down with the library (and wasn't confirmed dead until LoK), Jet died in such an ambiguous way that it became a joke, Aang got hit by lightning only partially on-screen (and came back), Roku got covered by lava, Combustion Man got blown up off-screen, and Kya's actual death was skipped in all three flashbacks.

LoK reverses that trend (to the point of showing the ugly aftermath of Professor Zei's refusal to leave the library!), but then proceeds to treat the much uglier deaths that do happen both as largely necessary and as necessarily ugly.  Amon's bloodbending and Zaheer's suffocation and poison have effects that are seriously unpleasant to watch, but there's no sense that they've got cleaner alternatives, since Mako's lightning looks nearly as bad.  Even something as clean as Korra's spiritbending is shown to have consequences for the family of the guy she killed (including Korra herself), though it's still positioned as the only viable solution.

But I don't think this weird and kind of counterproductive dynamic is limited to the Avatar franchise.  What really made me think of it was Superman vs. The Elite... which, ironically enough, I watched because I figured that if anyone could get me onboard with a no-killing policy, it'd be Superman.  (I'm one of the sort who feels like ignoring that part of him kind of misses the point of the character.  >.> )

Anyway, Superman had a line near the end where he said that, because of his actions, the people watching "saw the ugliness of violence as a solution and it frightened them," which would have been all well and good if the movie hadn't insisted on using its PG-13 rating for everything but showing lethal violence as ugly.  

Seriously, though, it was weird.  One villain swore like a British sailor, another was basically there to make suggestive comments, and another drank wine from a bottle in basically every scene he appeared in... but there still appeared to be some sort of policy against deaths being both painful and on-screen.  One villain had a power that instantaneously turned people to ash; his head got blown up by an anti-hero, which would have been way less kid-friendly if he hadn't been basically a skeleton in armor.  And when there were painful off-screen deaths, they came off as designed to show the anti-heroes as unnecessarily cruel.

And, as a result, what's actually shown is less "lethal violence is ugly" and more "lethal violence sounds painful when committed by sadistic jerks."  It sort of undercuts the point.

Since it's pretty clear that the need to keep to a rating wasn't the problem there, though, it made me wonder whether it might have more to do with the mindset of the people going for the "killing is the wrong solution" theme than the limitations under which they work.  I suppose that, for them, "lethal violence is ugly" is obvious to the point that it doesn't need to be shown.  But for someone like me, whose general philosophy is that justifiable self defense can include lethal violence where no other choice exists, opting out of showing why a hero might see it as too unpleasant to accept as a solution ends up feeling counterproductive.  =/

[actjustlylovemercy]

Gun control is not the answer to the U.S.'s high lethal violence rate

There is always a lot of political buzz around gun control. Democrats want stricter gun control laws while Republicans firmly claim their 2nd amendment right to bear arms. It's true that America has a much higher rate of lethal violence than any other country (Russia is the only country comparable to us in lethal violence. However the U.S. has fairly normal rates of violence compared to other industrialized democratic nations. Many politicians argue that U.S.'s high rate of lethal violence is due to our lax gun control policies, especially concerning hand guns. I would like to argue that creating stricter gun control laws will not solve the high lethal violence rate.

Several states have tried to pass legislation at the state level to increase loopholes people must pass before getting a handgun or increased the penalties for people using a handgun to commit a crime. Florida's 10-to-20-to life law that was passed in 1999 is a perfect example.

I've read articles on both sides of the argument and agree that guns do play a role in the high homicide rates the U.S. has compared to other countries (Zimring & Hawkins "The Great American Crime Decline"). But I don't think it's simply due to our laxed gun control laws.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice (BOJ) states that  Weapons Trafficking is the 3rd largest illegal business in the U.S. behind Human Trafficking & Drug Trafficking. A lot of guns that are used in mass killings or in street violence are obtained illegally. Hand guns and firearm laws are not the problem. People that go through legal means to get hand guns are generally not the ones to commit murder.  The problem people who obtain hand guns illegally and creating stricter handgun laws isn't going to touch those people. There are already good guidelines and regulations in place for people buying handguns the legal route. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, is all about saving lives and protecting people from harm—by not letting guns and explosives fall into the wrong hands. It also ensures the timely transfer of firearms to eligible gun buyers.

Mandated by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 and launched by the FBI on November 30, 1998, NICS is used by Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) to instantly determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to buy firearms or explosives. Before ringing up the sale, cashiers call in a check to the FBI or to other designated agencies to ensure that each customer does not have a criminal record or isn’t otherwise ineligible to make a purchase. More than 100 million such checks have been made in the last decade, leading to more than 700,000 denials. The Bureau of Justice has a ton of information and reports about efforts to control illegal weapons trafficking and their failure to do so effectively. I think a lot of the gun violence in the US isn't because of the 2nd amendment right of citizens to bear arms, it's because of the huge black market for guns available in the U.S.

Prohibiting hand guns in the U.S. is only going to increase the black market for guns, just like it did for alcohol and tobacco when we tried to prohibit them. There are already too many guns in circulation to prohibit them completely now, and doing so would piss too many people off because the government already has their hands in too many liberties in my opinion. Last major point I want to make is that gun homicides are the highest for teens. This goes back to my previous point that it's not the people who legally own handguns that are the problem. It's people who have guns illegally that are causing the major problems with gun violence. First of all, in most states a person must be above the age of 21 to own a hand gun. Look at the FBI's report here on page 137 on homicides and weapon trends from 1976-2005, you can see that guns are not used more today than they were 30 years ago (used from Bureau of Justice pdf on homicide trends

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf).

My main point, Gun Control laws will not remove the U.S.'s problem with lethal violence, it'll just piss the honest people who do own guns for recreation and safety off.

If we do anything, we need to focus on minimizing the illegal arms trade which is huge. We could also increase penalties for people carrying guns illegally if it was widely publicized like Florida's 10-20-life Law in 1999. I don't think it would have any deterrent effect on people who carry illegally but legislation like this would at least give prosecutors more tools to lock them up for doing so when they are caught.