Stephen Brophy wryly observes: "Since we're fighting anecdote-based universal censorship decisions with more anecdotes, here's mine: My son and his friends used to watch 1-2 'slasher' movies (they prefered the genre name 'slice-and-dice') every afternoon after school, when they weren't making up extremely violent Dungeons & Dragons adventures. One of my son's friends is now teaching in Namibia for the Peace Corps, and another is getting a masters degree in philosophy. But the most horrible outcome is my son's - he has become a Buddhist, and torments me every time I swat a mosquito! I wish I had totally prohibited violent videos during his adolescence - I could now kill as many bugs as I want to with impunity." Nice one, Stephen! Anecdotally, one can prove almost anything, but that proof has to be limited to the particular instance (if that). If John Hinkley really was inpired by TAXI DRIVER, why haven't millions of people stalked Jody Foster and tried to kill a politician? The remarkable thing about violence on film/tv is perhaps how much it *doesn't* inspire others to imitate it. And almost all discussions of "violence" that I've seen fail in their definitions and classifications. When correspondents here were talking about "cartoon" violence vs. "real" violence on TV, did they really mean to suggest that MORTAL KOMBAT should be equated with SCOOBY-DOO? (Only perhaps that both have really crappy animation!) But comparing Japanese Anime or HBO's SPAWN (not to be confused with the movie currently out) with Saturday Morning Cartoons is comparing apples with feldspar! Even talking about influence on "children" rarely deals with the developmental ages of particular children or their sophistication as readers/viewers of narrative. There are 18-year-olds (and 40-year-olds) who are less able to deal intelligently with some material than some 12-year-olds! Neither anecdotal generalizations nor mass longitudinal studies usually have the sophistication to deal with such differences. Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN) ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.sa.ua.edu/screensite