Wow this got heated! I don't think I'll touch the firearm discussion. I'll just mention pornography. I'll maintain my belief that pornography is designed to appeal to certain sexual tastes rather than to create them. I just think sexuality develops too early in life for that to be a factor (provided underage children aren't looking at porn). That's because I doubt seriously that I'm unusual and somehow not representative of the norm. And I know that no amount of looking at porn would change any of my sexual tastes because they've been ingrained since childhood (I know, I said that already). So I don't think pornography is trying to persuade anyone to like any kind of sex that they didn't already like (& why would it? there's already a huge audience). Yeah I know some sexual tastes include rape fantasies, fantasies of being humiliated, etc. And I can understand that those fantasies offend some people. A lot of fantasies are self-effacing and politically incorrect AND don't correspond to something the person actually wants to do. Plenty of normal people have sexual fantasies that they would never act on in real life (the fantasy of being raped is particularly prevalent). I think that porn can actually allow a safe place to explore those less-welcome fantasies. But I don't think porn causes anyone to act. Like I don't believe that violent video games cause a person to become violent (oops, strayed from the topic!). In some cases, it might even help relieve anger. I believe that a rapist was always pathological and would have been a rapist regardless of whether he ever looked at porn or not.

I certainly understand being offended by porn, and there's a definite case to be made that some of the actors are choosing that path because of past abuse. But I don't think porn changes people into something they are not.

Sidony