IS VIOLENCE PER SE BAD? EVEN IN THE MOVIES?
Eugene Volokh is dissecting Slate's silly charge that S.W.A.T. is "fascist," and everyone under the sun is discussing whether Arnold Schwarzenegger's violent movies disqualify him for public office. (See the comments on Al Barger's Blogcritics article for an example.) Now the obvious thing to say about violent movies is that they're not reality; they're art. As Gerard Jones convincingly argues in Killing Monsters, violent entertainment can serve an important psychological purpose for nonviolent, relatively powerless people, especially children.
But there is a real political divide here, and it's not about art. A significant portion of the population, especially in California, believes it is wrong to say, even in fiction, that violence ever solves problems or that violence is necessary to protect the innnocent. Few of these folks have the intellectual or moral rigor to call themselves pacifists, but they impose a pacifist moralism on public discussion: the default assumption is that violence is always wrong. But, of course, the famous Arnold line from True Lies often applies: "But they were all bad guys."
Perhaps an Arnold candidacy will make this sub rosa debate explicit, but I doubt it. For now, he's saying he's a nonviolent man who supports gun control.