Do you think music causes violence?

I think violent societies influence music to be violent. Music, much like literature or television, can be defined as an expression of culturally derived ideals. Art resonates only with the receptive; the question to ask, therefore, could be more one of why it is that people are receptive to violence in art. And that question is a lot like asking where culture comes from. I usually suggest that culture is an adaptive abstraction of the environment, assembled creatively from the cumulative expression of all conceptual tools that humanity has thusfar found itself able to abstract. So, things like language and metaphysical theory and emotion and anthropomorphic mythology would contribute more directly to violence in society than music. Music expresses these things.

I agree with you that the music is not to blame. I think people don't want to blame children because they don't want to believe children could do such awful things to someone else. So instead of blaming the child (or the parents where the blame should be shared), they find an outside source to blame it on. The music is often one of the first things that they find to blame. Same with video games and music. It's all the media's fault, apparently. Truly, more often than not, I think that the music (or entertainment) a child is interested in may (infrequently, albeit) be an indicator of what their mindset is rather than a cause. To put it a different way, I think sometimes people will turn to a certain sort of music because they identify with it - they don't kill people because they listen to that music, but they listen to that music because they identify with it. Of course, not everyone who listens to that music would kill people; you and your children are an example of that.