[P-Marlowe]

The big difference is that the only one that would have any positive effect on reducing the violence would be an assault on 'Hollywood' 1st amendment rights to distribute filth.

I am not so sure that "filth" was ever intended to be protected by the first amendment. And neither were obscene or gratuitously violent images.

The first Amendment was instituted to mainly protect political and religious speech. It was not instituted to protect every kind of "artistic expression". But the protections of the first amendment when it comes to pornography and other soul destroying imagery has been expanded whereas the right to religious expression and the right to bear arms to protect yourself from monsters has been slowly but surely limited.

If Hollywood is going to lecture America on the Evils of guns, then we need to lecture Hollywood on the Evils of violent imagery and lay the blame for this tragedy at their feet.

[xzins]

When you combine violent imagery, moral depravity/evil, marginal sanity, AND a 24/7 news cycle glorifying the perpetrator and providing him with lasting infamy, then you have a recipe that will insure these events are repeated.

And if you’re hoping to end the ownership of guns, hoping for the disarming of a free people, then you have a recipe for eventually accomplishing that, and you can accomplish it without fingerprints and with plausible deniability.

[Servant of the Cross]

I agree with this. It is at least as constitutionally valid a restriction on 'free speech' as are laws which prohibit yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theatre.

AND (apologies for the tangent) .... a federal law, which defines 'Marriage' as between a man and a woman, historically "self evident to all but the intentionally or ignorantly blind", should also pass Consitutional muster.

... "stop government at all levels from imposing the absurd instead of protecting the proven". FReeper DBeers