The Times has an article highlighting some interesting research that might silent those reactionaries who tell us that violent movies are not only a sign of degeneracy, but also an actual cause of real violence. Two economists, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, argue that by taking people who might otherwise be violent and putting them in a closed, calm, alcohol -free environment on weekend nights, violent movies reduce the number of violent incidents:

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

“You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said the lead author of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

Professor Dahl and the paper’s other author, Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, attach precise numbers to their argument: Over the last decade, they say, the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year.

The stuttering response from the anti-fun forces is pretty funny. What they can’t seem to realize is that Dahl and DellaVigna have found a trade-off between engaging in behavior that could lead to violence and watching violent movies, “What would these people have done if they had not chosen to go and see a movie? Whatever they would have done would have had a greater tendency to involve alcohol. If you can incapacitate a large group of potentially violent people, that’s a good thing.”

But despite Dahl’s good work, the conclusion he drew from his research — that we just need ways to herd young men into movie theaters on weekend nights so they don’t drink and fight — has a pretty frightening implication:

“We need more Adam Sandler movies,” he said. “Even though I’m not a big fan of Adam Sandler, that’s the implication.”