“I unapologetically take my 10-year-old son to PG-13 movies and have for years”

Writing at Time.com,
Stetson University psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson disposes of
the latest study, this one in Pediatrics, denouncing the
increase in depictions of fantasy violence in TV, movies, games,
and the like.

Where the study’s authors assert a causal link between movie
violece and real world horrors (“We know that movies teach children
how adults behave…”), Ferguson trots out the same data we at
Reason have been citing for decades:
“Both youth
violence overall and gun
violence specifically have declined precipitously
during recent decades as movie violence
rose.”

Ferguson ends his column with this great passage:

As a media-violence researcher myself, I unapologetically
take my 10-year-old son to PG-13 movies and have for years, knowing
full well what’s in them. At the theater I see mainly families, not
hordes of unsupervised children. Moreover, there’s a vast gulf
between the cartoonish violence of PG-13 movies and real-life
violence. Beliefs in the harmfulness of PG-13 movies rest on the
notion that the human brain is unable to distinguish between the
violence of Thor and violence in
real life. Movie violence can sound offensive in the abstract, but
I suspect if many parents were asked if they would stop taking
their children to see The
Avengers or Man of
Steel, the answer would be “no.”