You’re really reading a lot into what I’ve said. You seem to suggest that I am saying that there is no place for discretion or restraint, but that’s not my point at all. Of course I’m not saying that the news should show every gory detail of every murder or accident or tragedy. But they’re just reporting what has actually happened, and those details would do nothing to better inform the public.

You’re also completely missing my point about showing the consequences of violence in children’s programs. I’m not saying that I really wish that there had been more blood and death in G.I. Joe. I’m suggesting that since the producers of that show were not willing to portray violence accurately, they probably shouldn’t have shown it at all. My point is that showing consequence-free violence is potentially more harmful than showing realistic violence, because it gives kids an unrealistic idea of effects of violent behavior.

Regarding violent play, some parents don’t allow their kids to play with toy guns or to pretend to fight, and I think that’s a valid choice. Others allow their kids to play-fight, but make sure to teach them the difference between make-believe and reality. You argue that young kids shouldn’t be exposed to realistic portrayals of violence, and I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m suggesting that it’s probably best not to show them violence at all.

The world can be a terrible place. By your argument should the nightly news show the bloody bodies when they report murders, or the decomposing bodies when they find the kidnap victim, or the strung out druggies in places that you’d not feel safe, or the starvation victim’s emaciated corpses left where they lay. Even adults rarely handle ‘the whole truth’. We know it is there, but something keeps us from looking too close.

At a certain age, kids use imaginary guns (or wands or bows, etc). But no adult interupts them with a visual reprimand of all of the horrors or war until the tyke decides to reform himself.

I think that as an adult you are saying to yourself, I was lied to as a kid. As an adult, I now think I could have handled ‘the whole truth’. And you would be wrong. Kids are different from our adult memories of what we think we were like as kids. Real kids have nightmares. Before you go off advocating potential harm, you should understand the psychological development of children.

More on topic, as I pointed out elsewhere — http://www.soldiersthecomic.com/on-killing-pulling-the-trigger/ — one of the reasons people do stupid things is that physical violence is utterly alien to the vast majority of us, so we don’t *know* what it involves. E.g. if you’ve never been in a fistfight, you don’t know it hurts… and you’re more likely to think it works like in the movies.So yeah, shielding kids from lessons about real life is most likely a terrible idea.