Brittany's post about Combat Zone Wrestling raises many interesting points, but is it clear that staged, public violence like CZW actually leads to more "real" violence?

The empirical evidence that any specific cultural celebration of violence - violent music, tv shows, movies, wrestling - actually causes real violence is vague at best.

In fact, there is good empirical evidence that events like Combat Zone Wrestling can actually reduce violence.  The way this works out is that a whole lot of criminal violence - assaults and the like - are caused by the combination of two volatile elements.  Crowds of young men and alcohol.  Any place where you have young men drinking, the likelihood of there being some violence is pretty high, relatively speaking.  Ever seen a bar or night club closing (not that I have…)?  And so anything that can take young men, especially those who would be more likely to be violent after a few drinks,  out of bars and into an environment where they will spend a good portion of the night not drinking, you are basically sure to see a reduction in violence.  Two University of California economists did research looking at the effect of large showings of violent movies and had some encouraging results:

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.

Replace “violent movies” with “Combat Zone Wrestling” and I imagine the effect is identical if not even more pronounced.  So how does this effect our moral or cultural evaluation of CZW?  What do we value more: vague, unsubstantiated claims that Combat Zone Wrestling is bad for our culture because we feel icky about it, or empirical evidence that things like Combat Zone Wrestling actually have a real effect of reducing violent assaults?  I don’t  know the answer, but this research is definitely something to keep in mind next time anyone talks wrestling or any public display of violence as some kind of cancer on our culture.