President Obama’s proposal, in his gun control package, that Congress allocate $10 million to study “the relationship between video games, media images, and violence,” is hardly the most damaging policy suggestion to come out of our current debate about gun violence, but it ignores the fact that this is a question that’s been studied before, to no particularly conclusive result. Ralph Nader’s declaration that video games are “electronic child molesters” is vastly more hysterical. Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson’s proposed legislation to require identification for the sale of video games much in the same way as tobacco or alcohol would disrupt both the voluntary ratings system that the gaming industry already has in place, and impose new requirements on brick-and-mortar retailers and online outlets.

What all of these reactions have in common, however, is that they cater to the public’s anxieties about violent media rather than trying to handle them in a rational fashion. And in doing so, they’re conflating three debates that ought to be handled separately: parents’ ability to control the media their children consume, the public policy question of whether media has an impact in the real world, and the creative question of whether violence in media remains narratively and thematically rich. We have an interest in making sure parents can make the right decisions for our families, that we’re evaluating risk factors for gun violence in ways that will make for rigorous and effective policy, and preserving creative freedom for artists to do their best work. Conflating those interests, particularly if we’re doing so to make one seem more serious, runs the risk that we won’t find the solutions that will best serve any of these concerns.

A CBS-New York Times poll released last week found that that 42 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats said that violence in movies and video games contribute to gun violence a lot, and 41 percent of Republicans and 32 percent of Democrats said that media makes at least some contribution to gun violence. Those are strikingly high numbers for a belief that isn’t backed by conclusive evidence.

I can understand certain parental concerns about the ability to control what their children consume, something that ends when their children leave the house either temporarily or permanently. John Landgraf, the president of FX, spoke to some of those worries at the Television Critics Association press tour when he talked about his own approach with his children children, who have grown up without gaming consoles in the house and without access to first-person shooters. “If you ask my 15 year old, who has played a lot of it at other friends’ houses and stuff, he says, ‘Well, it’s kind of disturbing because you’re not hunting. You’re not hunting for food. You’re in a first person context, and you’re killing everything in sight,’” he explained. As someone who hasn’t yet raised children of my own, I can imagine how unsettling it would be to send them out into the world worried that they’d encounter media they haven’t been prepared for or that they might find upsetting.
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Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles have discovered brain damage in living ex-professional football players, a big-time revelation they hope could lend itself, eventually, to the first diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a living football player:

Brain scans performed on five former NFL players revealed images of the protein that causes football-related brain damage — the first time researchers have identified signs of the crippling disease in living players.

Researchers who conducted the pilot study at UCLA described the findings as a significant step toward being able to diagnose the disease known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, in living patients.

“I’ve been saying that identifying CTE in a living person is the Holy Grail for this disease and for us to be able make advances in treatment,” said Dr. Julian Bailes, a Chicago neurosurgeon and one of the study’s co-authors. “It’s not definitive and there’s a lot we still need to discover to help these people, but it’s very compelling. It’s a new discovery.”

Right now, doctors can only diagnose CTE post-mortem — and they have in 34 former football players, including Junior Seau, who committed suicide last May. But this study of five former players, all of whom suffered at least one concussion, found “a pattern consistent with the distribution of tau,” an abnormal protein linked to CTE, “in CTE brains that have been studied following autopsy.”

The study is a small one, and its findings are preliminary. But if the preliminary findings “hold up in future studies, this may be an opportunity to identify CTE before players have symptoms so we can develop preventative treatment,” the study’s lead author said.

What future findings could also do, though, is further the discussion about whether the problem is concussions or football itself. Other studies have suggested the latter could be the case, and this seems to hint in that direction. Though all five players suffered at least one concussion, one was a little-used back-up quarterback who had suffered just one — and he still ended up with brain trauma. Building on this research and developing “preventative treatment” to address CTE would be a major breakthrough, one that will likely take years more of research. What we could find out, though, is that the only way to prevent CTE is to not play football. And if the discussion moves past how to protect players to if we can, there are going to be a lot of attitudes to change.

First, a huge thanks to Alan Pyke, Sharmin Kent, and Betsy Phillips for filling in while I was at Sundance, with help from Zack Beauchamp and Travis Waldron. I’m incredibly grateful for their help, and I hear you gave them a great time.

It makes a certain amount of sense to me that, given the vitriol directed at President Obama, that some insecurities about presidential safety would come out in Hollywood products, the first of which, Olympus Has Fallen, has released its initial trailer:

What’s most interesting to me is not so much that the presidency is portrayed as under attack, or the psychological struggles of Gerard Butler (for that, I recommend Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation of Coriolanus, in which Butler is tremendous, as is everyone else), but who’s doing the attacking. Initially, the movie throws out images of mujahideen-like attackers wielding rocket launchers, only to transition to Washington, DC-born actor Rick Yune playing some kind of sinister and powerful if as-yet-nationally-unaffiliated foreigner who hired them. My bet was that he ends up being North Korean or from some other not-particularly-powerful Asian country that Americans don’t actually feel any geopolitical anxiety about, though, as with the North Koreans in Red Dawn, he’ll be standing in for our worries about an emergent China, or something.

I understand why pop culture wants to play with American worries about our place in the world, why a movie would show the consequences of our actions blowing back on us, why Homeland throws out the specter of symbols like Hezbollah and al Qaeda hooking up, despite the geopolitical realities that divide those groups. But it would be nice if we could deal with those anxieties in a way that reflect reality. The White House doesn’t always have to blow up for us to acknowledge that we’re worried about our place in the world.