Justice & Law Quote by Hugh Mackay

Mackay’s question is a neat little trap for the reader’s pattern-hungry brain. He takes a familiar moral panic story line - violent games and brutal screens are “poisoning” society - then flips the correlation on its head. If the timeline is the same but the outcome is the opposite of what crusaders predict, why are we so confident we’ve found a cause? The sting is in the word “should”: it doesn’t ask what’s true, it asks whether we’re being intellectually honest.

The intent isn’t to defend Grand Theft Auto or Hollywood gore as civic medicine. It’s to expose how selectively we treat evidence when fear is the fuel. Mackay is pointing at a common rhetorical move: treating coincidence as proof, but only when it confirms a preloaded anxiety about youth, technology, and cultural decline. His hypothetical conclusion is deliberately absurd, a reductio ad absurdum that forces the audience to feel the difference between narrative satisfaction and actual explanation.

Context matters here: late-20th and early-21st century debates about media effects have often been conducted like morality plays, with “the media” cast as the villain and statistical nuance as collateral damage. Mackay’s subtext is that complex social outcomes (crime rates) have many drivers - policing strategy, demographics, economics, incarceration, lead exposure, reporting practices - and that blaming entertainment is emotionally convenient because it locates the problem somewhere else. The line lands because it uses the reader’s own logic against them, making certainty look less like conviction and more like wishful thinking dressed up as common sense.