TV Violence Increases Homicides

Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D.
Thursday, Aug. 17, 2000

Recently, the media, including medical journalists in organized medicine (i.e.,
American Medical Association and affiliates) have focused their attention on the
associations of violence in television, music, video games and movies to violent
behavior in children and adolescents. To this end, a consensus statement of
experts released July 26 and sponsored by the AMA and other medical groups
proclaimed, “At this time, well over 1,000 studies – including reports from the
surgeon general’s office, the National Institute of Mental Health and numerous
studies conducted by leading figures within our medical and public health
organizations – point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media
violence and aggressive behavior in some children.”

Moreover, the report continued, “Its effects are measurable and long-lasting:
prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward
violence in real life.”

It should be of interest to the public to learn that some of the most important,
breakthrough research papers on this topic first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.
The pioneering research was conducted and the paper written by Dr. Brandon
Centerwall of the University of Washington School of Public Health. Centerwall’s
studies found that homicide rates in Canada were not related to easy gun availability
in ordinary citizens, as he had expected, but to criminal behavior associated with
watching television. He found that homicide rates, not only in Canada, but in the
U.S. and South Africa soared 10 to 15 years after the introduction of television in
those countries.

In the U.S., there was an actual doubling of homicide rates after the introduction of
television. Moreover, Dr. Centerwall noted that up to half of all homicides, rapes, and
violent assaults in the U.S. were directly attributed to violence on television. And that
was when violence on TV was nothing compared to the rampant and graphic
violence depicted today in the movies and on TV.

As for gun control policies, Centerwall, in fact, showed with elegant data that
draconian gun control measures had not reduced Canadian homicides. Homicide
rates in Vancouver, for example, were lower before the gun control laws had been
passed in Canada, and in fact rose after the laws were passed. The Vancouver
homicide rate increased 25 percent after the institution of the 1977 Canadian gun
laws.

His classic article on the shortcomings of Canada’s gun control laws was published
not in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the
American Medical Association but in the Journal of Epidemiology; thus his valuable
research was not made widely available. His momentous research paper was
virtually consigned to the “memory hole” of the public health establishment because
it was politically incorrect.

Fortunately, his research pointing to the effects of television violence affecting
homicide rates has been made available. It’s time that his data exculpating gun
availability in ordinary, law-abiding citizens from any linkage to homicide rates
should be made available to Canadians as well as Americans.

* * *

Dr. Miguel A. Faria Jr. is the editor-in-chief of Medical Sentinel, the official journal of
the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and author of “Vandals at
the Gates of Medicine: Historic Perspectives on the Battle Over Health Care
Reform” (1995) and “Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine”
(Macon, Ga., Hacienda Publishing Inc., 1997), http://www.haciendapub.com.