Top-rated Westerns succeeded for years with virtually no on-screen violence

Evidence

However, in the view of television storytellers, nonviolent resolutions are unthinkable, especially in the Western genre. In point of fact, such conflict resolutions are not only conceivable. They are doable. For example, the Western series Wyatt Earp, which enjoyed a six-year run at the top of its time slot, included only one shooting, which was a reenactment of the historic fight at the OK Corral (Senate Hearings, 1962). Consistent with the historical character, Wyatt Earp was portrayed as a police officer on the Western frontier who dealt with troublemakers in a mindful way. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 855

Categorization

• CANDY: Wyatt Earp ran top-of-timeslot for six years with one shooting — a fun counterfactual tidbit against the ‘violence is inevitable’ assumption.
• XREF: Empirical falsification of a displacement-of-responsibility rationalization fits the reader’s goal: mechanism excuses are defeasible by counter-examples, the way vault claims about authoritarian rationalization are tested.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 855