The Patriot Post® · Children and Cartoon Violence

When Wile E. Coyote debuted decades of road-runner targeted violence in the late 1940s, there was a national outcry that children would begin building copy-cat Acme contraptions to catapult boulders onto their unsuspecting neighbors. Even worse were Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam who used guns to target an innocent anthropomorphic rabbit, thereby modeling misbehavior with guns to children.

Ok, we kid. There wasn’t an outcry.

Back then, society still had something called a moral compass and children were, by and large, raised in two-parent families that generally taught them right from wrong and the difference between fantasy and reality. And kids therefore knew “Looney Toons” wasn’t reality.

How far we’ve come.

It’s not surprising that the latest attack on our constitutional right to bear arms is being pedaled as a “save the children” campaign.

Dr. Alan Delamater, the director of clinical psychology at the Mailman Center for Child Development at UHealth at the University of Miami Health System recently opined, “Exposure to guns and violence is not good for optimal child development, nor is it good for public health. Research shows that repeated and excessive exposure to aggression and gun violence through movies, TV and video games increases the probability of children behaving aggressively toward others later.”

Sounds logical, right? Only, as The Truth About Guns founder Robert Farago writes, “And yet tens of millions of American children grow-up to be law-abiding citizens. Gun owners, too! How in the world does that happen?”

Anti-gun activists will find any reason to blame guns (or, in this case, video games involving guns) for violence. But their thinking defies logic. As anyone of even mediocre intelligence knows, if you repeatedly conduct an experiment but consistently have different results, the variable — not the constant — is causing the change.

Guns, as we know, have been around and accessible for centuries. Guns aren’t the variable. And for decades, countless children have been exposed to video games yet have not grown up to be violent killers. Video games aren’t the variable, either.

Instead, we have to look beyond the video games and guns —a blasphemous thought for those who want to disarm Americans — and to the utter instability of the American family and the moral worldview now prevalent in our society.

More than 24 million children in America (33%) live in a home without their biological father, according to the National Center for Fathering. Among black children, the percentage rises to more than half. In fact, economist Walter Williams writes, “About 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. By the way, that percentage was 25 in 1963 and 11 in 1938.” During the post-war generation, when kids knew not to imitate Wile, Yosemite and Elmer at home, more than 87% of children grew up with two biological parents who were married to each other. But that was before the “Great Society.”

Statistics show that children — specifically boys — without fathers are more likely to become involved in crime.

It’s hardly surprising. Children who grow up in fatherless homes understandably suffer from anger over being fatherless. Unless they are adequately taught to work through this anger, they can become violent. As Psychology Today reported a few years ago, 85% of youth in prison for crimes, including violent crimes, have an absent father.

Couple this fatherlessness, anger and violence with a rejection of traditional morality, and voila, we have the variable. (Hint: It’s still not guns or video games).

Today, 57% of American adults believe that knowing right from wrong is “a matter of personal experience,” according to a Barna study. Among Millennials, an astounding 74% strongly or somewhat agree with the statement, “Whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know.”

What else do we expect kids to learn from Democrat-run education industrial complex schools that reject God-given truth?

Yet, in the face of this crisis, what are leftists doing? They’re teaching kids that homosexuality — which defies all laws of nature, breeds deadly illnesses, and carries significantly high suicide risks — is normal. The supposedly kid-friendly Nickelodeon, just introduced the network’s first same-sex married couple in a children’s cartoon.

In other words, “progressives” are advocating the further destruction of the family while indoctrinating children to accept a behavior that leads to disease and suicide.

And they’re worried about video games corrupting the youth?