th. The novel popularlized the abolitionist movement and is believed to have been a major cause for the Civil War, which even though a noble cause, resulted in over 500,000 deaths (The Student Handbook 2: 592). In 1980 Mark Chapman, a former mental patient, shot and killed John Lennon. When asked why he did it, he indicated that he got the idea to kill Lennon from J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (590). He felt that he and the main character in the story, Holden Caufield, were very similar because they were both angry social outcasts, who were recovering from a mental breakdown (590). Violence is prominent in children's novels too. R.L. Stine's novel The Babysitter III, tells of decapitating a baby and in Christopher Pike's novel, Monster, there is a graphic description of the effects of a shotgun being fired at a person's head at close range. Roderick McGillis, a professor of English at the University of Calgary and author of a book on children's literature, has written that, "What disturbs me is that we're developing in our culture, in our cities, a kind of siege mentality. A lot of thes books reinforce this, make it sort of normal to think that the world is a place in which violence can erupt at any moment" (Gray 54). With all of this evidence it is hard to ignore the fact that violence in entertainment can cause violence in society. This paper has now shown that there are copycat kilers who get the idea for their crimes from entertainment. It has also been shown that the more violent movies and television children watch the more likely thay are to become aggressive and violent. Violence in entertainment and society is not isolated to the present, it was also very prominent in the writings of Shakespeare. With the evidence showing that violence in entertainment causes real life violence, it is very hard to say that violence in entertainment is justifiable. When little children and adults alike, fall victim to entertainmen...
