By JoAnne Viviano, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – An Ohio State researcher is calling on the Motion Picture Association of America to step up its warning system after a study showed that children who saw guns in movies were almost three times more likely to pull the trigger of a real gun than were children who watched the same films without those gun scenes.
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The study, published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, involved 52 pairs of children ages 8 to 12.
The youngsters each watched a 20-minute version of a PG-rated film — 1991’s “The Rocketeer” or 2004’s “National Treasure” — and then played with toys and games for 20 minutes in a room with a cabinet containing a real, disabled handgun.
The children who saw the films with gun scenes spent 53 seconds holding the gun, compared with 11 seconds for children who saw the non-gun films. Those who watched the gun scenes pulled the trigger about 2.8 times, compared with 0.01 times for the other children.
Researchers randomly selected eight pairs of children, half of whom had watched the gun-containing films, to study them more closely. One child who had seen the gun scenes held the gun for 18 minutes and pulled the trigger 26 times, once at his friend’s temple. Another who saw the gun scenes pulled the trigger 35 times, including at pedestrians seen through a lab window.