A new study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania has found that the amount of gun violence has risen in top-grossing PG-13 movies, exceeding the violence appearing in R-rated films. The study covers films through 2015 and was recently updated since its initial publishing in 2012.
Recent offenders are The Divergent Series: Insurgent, Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens — all three contain eight, five-minute gun segments in which a character shoots and hits another character.
Last year’s Suicide Squad was also added to the list despite not being directly measured in the study, but research director Dan Romer, expressed the film is “very violent and uses a lot of guns as weapons and they don’t show the harm.”
The study emphasizes that children of all ages can see PG-13 movies and that films with the rating are notable for “erasure of the consequences” of gun violence, including bloodshed and suffering. Romer elaborated that,
“We know people who see actors smoking in movies are more likely to start smoking, so why wouldn’t we think actors with guns would have the same effect?”
The entire list of offending movies can be found here.
Do you think these films have played an impact on influencing the children who’ve watched them?
