Costumed superheroes have developed a bit of a bad reputation over the past several months, and not without cause: There was the Spider-Man robbery on Hollywood Boulevard, the She-Hulk assault in York, England, the brawl between Spider-Man and two Captain Americas on Hollywood Boulevard, the Iron Man bank robbery in Florida, and, just this morning, the Spider-Man store robbery in Pittsburgh.

OK, so it's primarily Spider-Man causing the problems. But can we blame the wall-crawler for the horrible violence plaguing an entire country? Let's ask Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose nation saw 16,000 murders in 2012, and another 3,400 in the first quarter of this year.

In a new interview with the Bolivian newspaper La Opinión, Maduro said there's a correlation between youth violence and the idolization of superheroes -- it contributes to a "factory of anti-values," apparently -- a connection he made while he and his wife were watching Spider-Man 3.

"This kid, at 14 years old, carries a 9mm with a mind filled by thousands of hours of shows where people are killed," he said. "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. [...] That's the trouble, from the beginning until the end there are more and more dead," he said. "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."

Before J. Jonah Jameson orders that special edition of the Daily Bugle, it's worth pointing out that Maduro has also claimed the spirit of his late predecessor Hugo Chávez spoke to him through a little bird to say he's doing a fine job running the country.

(via The Huffington Post)