The fan-on-fan violence at Candlestick, along with less severe but equally creepy brawls in Baltimore during Friday night's meeting between the Ravens and Chiefs, was immediately lumped in with an attack earlier this summer on Bryan Stow, who is still in the hospital, months after being savagely beaten at Dodgers Stadium for the crime of being a Giants fan.

On his video blog for ESPN.com, Jeremy Schapp articulated the conventional wisdom that fan-on-fan violence merely reflects a rising tide of aggression in society a whole. It's hard, Schapp said, not to "see a correlation between what's happening with fans, and what's happening in the culture at large," suggesting that this culture-wide rise in violence is caused, at least in part, by the widening gap between rich and poor.

Toronto Star columnist Cathal Kelly agrees with the economic argument. He writes that "times for many North Americans are mean, and as a result, North Americans are getting meaner."

Seems logical. There's only one problem. It's not true. There is no rising tide of violence, not if you believe the FBI crime statistics, whose latest figures show a 5.5 percent drop in reported violent crimes between 2009 and 2010.

Mark Purdy of the San Jose Mercury News rightly notes that binge drinking has more to do with the problem than economics, but he also blames the NFL for creating an atmosphere that's conducive to violence. Purdy specifically mentions league marketing campaigns "that portray fan loyalty as some sort of tribal warfare." Apparently in all seriousness he suggests "All My Rowdy Friends," the Hank Williams Jr. track played before each Monday Night Football game, as typical of marketing that promotes bad behavior. How, exactly, lyrics like "Are you ready for some football?/It's a Monday Night party!" encourages fans to beat on each other remains unclear.

Tim Dahlberg of the Associated Press concurs, and he doesn't hedge by blaming the league's cultivated rowdy image. He simply blames the game, and says the NFL is at fault for fan bad behavior, because football itself inherently makes people aggressive.

"The NFL glorifies violence," Dahlberg writes. And "sometimes that violence spreads to people wearing the replica jerseys in the stands."

Conveniently ignored by this theory, of course, is that Bryan Stow was attacked at a baseball game, and how soccer, which has much less contact than American football, has far more violence in the stands. In fact, although some experts disagree, at least one Nobel Laureate, Konrad Lorenz, famously argued that football, far from causing aggression, provides a socially constructive outlet for it.

If you really need a scapegoat, why not blame technology? There may be less violence overall in society, but thanks to omnipresent cellphones and security cameras, much more of it is caught on camera and broadcast to the world.