The U.S. is exceptionally violent as compared to most other developed countries. There are many contributors to the origins of that culture--frontier mentality, slave suppression, etc--but what's left today is the violence. In middle-class society that tendency toward violence is kept in check by other cultural norms and, arguably, redirected in various ways, such as a harshly punitive penal system, suppression of underclasses, etc. But among the American working class and, especially, the poor, that violence manifests in very direct, brutal ways. My step brother travels the country working at refineries, which tend to be located in impoverished areas, and just the other day we were discussing some of the things he's seen around the country--knife fights, gun fights, and countless bar fights. My dad has more than his fair share of scars from when he traveled from town to town for work. I saw and experienced plenty of things as a child that many Americans, not to mention foreigners from less violent countries, would only expect to see in a movie. All this stuff is mostly hidden from direct view by the middle classes. But if you grew up poor or poor-adjacent, things often look quit different.

In my travels and readings I've found that countries have distinct tendencies toward violence that clearly emanate from their culture, not from objective markers like poverty, income, etc. For example, in the 1990s Ecuador had the lowest homicide rate in the Americas, despite often crushing poverty. In the early 2000s there was a surge of Columbian immigrants in search of work. Columbian culture was far more violent than Ecuador's, much like the U.S. (as opposed to simply a consequence of organized crime), and rates of violence soared. Not because the Columbian immigrants were criminals, but because those who resorted to crime did so in a more violent manner.

But my point wasn't to say that the U.S. is unsafe. Just that what makes a culture (and people) violent isn't superficial behaviors. Guns don't make America violent. America loves guns because we're a violent society. To be clear, we love guns not because we feel we have to defend ourselves, but we because we fetishize the idea of defending ourselves amidst our own violence. Take away the guns and homicides might drop, but the tendency toward violence will simply remain latent, and all the other manifestations of that culture of violence will remain. It doesn't mean we can't become a safer, better society. We have and we are. We'll just follow a different, often trailing path as compared to less violent societies.

If we want our kids to internalize a different set of norms and expectations, it's these subtle cues that we have to watch for, not the artifice. Kids can see through artifice, at least to the extent they haven't internalized the norms the artifice reflects or disguises. They don't need to be protected from video games or gun culture or gore; they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies, rather than to let it seep in quietly. Those cues are subtle and pervasive and to some extent exist even within, e.g., Disney's otherwise saccharine world. For example, Disney's woke culture messaging (as well meaning and useful as it is) reflects the narrative of two groups pitted against each other, one right and one wrong, where the latter either needs to be vanquished or converted. Unlike in traditional fairy tales, in American narratives the boogeyman is your nextdoor neighbor, not a troll or a witch. We think we're sending sophisticated, moral, good messages, and we are, but it's not all we're sending.