Dr. Welner's interview followed Piers Morgan's discussion with Los Angeles based editor of Vanity Fair, Krista Smith in which Ms. Smith represented the perspective of Hollywood: "Just because I watch a Quentin Tarantino movie and I love it doesn't mean I'm going to think I'm Uma Thurman and I'm going to go out and, you know, slice people up with my machete. I think that there's a big disconnect," questioning exactly what research has linked entertainment violence with the perpetrators of spectacle mass killing. She concluded by noting, "I think we have a bigger problem in the future with all these, you know, young adults, men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and they've been doing two or three tours of duty and they've actually really seen horrific things in real life and had done them, had witnessed them."
In the following segment, Dr. Welner took on Hollywood's dismissive attitude to the role of media violence in the segment, linked here. Citing professional case experience, Dr. Welner noted, When I have a case of an attempted mass killer who tried to get into the NBC Today Show's studios after watching Natural Born Killers ten times, do I need a research project to tell me that he is drawing influence?... We are infusing vulnerable people with a culture in which parents are substituted by not just video games but video games in which people can take a point of view approach to destroying everyone around them. They're incentivized by getting points and no more important person than Anders Breivik, the most devastating mass killer in history wrote a manual about how to use video games as training, a manual which Adam Lanza studied. And this is exactly the way the phenomenon of mass killing goes that people who want to kill for the sake of killing, they look up to people. They compile their spreadsheets because Adam Lanza wanted to be on the next spreadsheet."
As for prescriptive ways to impact the violent entertainment industry, Dr. Welner suggested, "Do you as a parent watching this, you think your child is going to get into Harvard watching Grand Theft Auto? Do you think your child would suffer if every person watching this would make a big bonfire on your front lawn for in every single violent video game and vow, 'I will never pay for another violent movie because, you know what, I'm going to suck the economy out of Hollywood'. And then you know what, then you're going to get socially responsible movie making."
Click here to watch the full segment of Dr. Welner on Piers Morgan Tonight.
