French Politicians Call for Scream Ban

The recent murder of a 15-year-old girl by her classmate has French politicians up in arms. Apparently inspired by the slasher film, a 17-year-old boy stabbed her and left her for dead.

This is very tragic, of course and I don't want to make light of that fact, but is banning a movie really going to make any difference? Let's face it, if you're wiring is so badly crossed that seeing a hokey horror flick like Scream is going to have that kind of influence on you, probably you're not all that far from snapping anyway. What if this kid hadn't seen Scream? Probably a week or month or year down the road he would have seen some other scary movie, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something, that would have had a similiar effect. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised, unbalanced as this individual obviously is, if 101 Dalmations would have been enough to make the voices in this kid's head start yelling "Kill!".

What's to be done, then? Do we ban all scary/violent movies? Of course not. There's a lot of stabbing in Shakespeare's works, as well. People getting stabbed left and right, among other things. If the kid had seen a production of Hamlet and then ran off and poisoned or stabbed someone a week later, would they want to ban that, too?