Looks like J. Jonah Jameson isn't the only person blaming Spidey for the ills of society anymore.

Not to be outdone by the pundits and politicians of the United States, with their constant finger-wagging at the videogame industry, Venezulan president Nicolas Maduro has fingered everyone's favorite wall-crawler as the cause for Venezuela's high rate of violent crimes.

Venezuela is presently one of the most violent countries in Latin America, with more than 16,000 recorded murders in 2012 and around 3,400 so far this year. That's pretty alarming, so it's understandable for the president to be seeking out the cause of all that violence.

We're just not sure anyone was expecting Maduro to blame Spider-Man in the Bolivian daily La Opinión on Wednesday. He feels that superhero worship leads to a "factory of antivalues." According to Maduro:

This kid, at 14 years old, carries a 9mm with a mind filled by thousands of hours of shows where people are killed. I start to think how many thousands of hours of violence that kid will have consumed, in the end, stimulated by consumerism and violence when he grabs a 9 mm and goes to kill.

Sure, we could ask why the 14-year-old has a 9mm in the first place, but, never mind that, Maduro just watched Spider-Man 3 and needs to weigh in on it!

That's the trouble, from the beginning until the end there are more and more dead. And that's one of the series small children love most... because it's attractive, it's from comics that are attractive, the figure, the colors and movements... so much so that we finished watching it at four in the morning.

I'm not going to try to redeem Spider-Man 3 (because it's not very good), but isn't a core part of that particular film the struggle Peter Parker faces about justifying extreme violence? And doesn't he, ultimately, eschew the notion of killing in cold blood in the name of the greater good because he chooses to believe that even the most misguided of mankind still deserve a second chance?

It's not that there's no violence in those movies, but the theme song isn't exactly "Spider-Man, Spider-Man, murders whatever a spider can" either, you know? If anything, it's kind of the opposite.

But maybe I'm crazy and Maduro is onto something. Maybe Spider-Man and videogames are the real killers. What do you think?

(via The Huffington Post)