In comparison to the ancient Romans, modern Americans seem far less bloodthirsty. After all, writes Ray Surette, author of The Media and Criminal Justice Policy, “We do not kill real people in public spectacles.” Nevertheless, warns Surette, the level of fictional Violence in American culture is staggering: “We have eased the access to fantasy slaughter far beyond anything the Romans dreamed of.”
According to researcher George Gerbner, “Never was a culture so filled with full-color images of violence as ours is now.” Gerbner’s Cultural Indicators project, which has monitored TV violence since 1968, estimates that the average American child views more than 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television during the elementary school years. A 1992 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the typical American child will witness 40,000 on-screen murders by the age of eighteen.