Blast from the Past

Besides being astonished by the amount of 80's music on the radio --it exceeds the amount of new releases by far, the popularity of Star Wars among 7 to 9 year-olds blows me away. Lately I have watched my son play Star Wars with his friends, though he only saw the movie the other night. He played along just fine with my basic summaries of the movies and characters, though I had to correct talk of "rookies" to "Wookies". Either the movies are overly simplistic or children do not "get" a lot of it. I believe it is mostly the latter; shows for kids often have dialogue for the benefit of adults. I have noticed that, since he watched the movie, guns are more prevalent in his play. Col. Grossman at www.killology.com has many sources to back up the correlation between video games and increased violence (the Marine Corps uses violent video games to induce a willingness to kill). I think we'll scale down the level of violence that he watches for a bit until this stimulus is diluted a bit.