Ok wait, wait, wait....
Now we're REALLY showing age and perspective here.
Professor - lets set the way-back machine to the late '80s, early '90s. I was about 10 years old in 1989, which was at the absolute height of the original gangsta rap movement.
Remember a little group called NWA? 'Niggaz with attitude?'
Visual for you incase you're too young:
Notice the guns? These guys weren't just some white fucking kids pretending to be gangsters, they were full-on real-life gang members rapping about killing police and doing drive-bys and shit.
When I was about eleven years old, I was then introduced to Body Count by one of my friends. Here's a taste of one of their songs, again if age is restricting your memory.
/images/flash_video_placeholder.png
Glorifying what? That's right... the murdering of police officers.
Shit.. there's even a track on this album called 'momma's gotta die tonight' in which Ice T rap/rocks about killing his mother by dousing her bed in lighter fluid and burning her alive.
When this shit hit the mainstream media, and us dumb fuck white kids ate it up - parents freaked the fuck out.
Religious groups, politicians, and scared white people of all kinds flocked the world doing EVERYTHING they could to 'save the children' and keep this music out of our hands.
All of a sudden there was a wave of albums which were 'banned'. Yes, they were pulled off of record store shelves, ripped from the radio, snatched off of MTV. Those days, there was no interwebz either, so the only way to get your hands on some banned shit was to try to copy it from a buddy or something. It was super hard to get this stuff...
What it did though, despite being vilified by mainstream media and pulled from every distribution channel imaginable... is make us all want it just that much more. Sometimes you could buy the 'clean' version at the store after they went through their legal battles, but what everyone wanted was to hear what they REALLY wanted to say. Albums would come missing tracks, with blanks or beeps on them... it was horrors.
The funny part is that has lasted until today, and to all of you its probably super normal to hear blanks/different lyrics/beeps in a song. That was a totally new thing in the late '80s.
The other part (and now that I've set it up) that makes your statement laughable is the fact that hardly anyone turned into a fucking gang member and started shooting cops, killing mama or selling crack because of the music they listened to. All us kids used to make fun of the adults for thinking that we were so dumb that the music we listened to would make us do things which we knew were wrong.
Shitty parents are what makes kids to shitty things. If someone is going to emulate this kind of fantasy, then there are a horribly disturbed human being and they were destined for a life of crime no matter what.
Sure you've seen GSW's, but why aren't you ranting about how horrible 99% of media on our planet is? Amercian movies, television, rap music, books, games... you name it... all glorify violence and irresponsible gun use. However, in certain media, we've realized that a little bit of fantasy is fun and OK once in a while. I mean nobody watches Die Hard and says "Jeeze... bruce willis really couldn't cause that much damage in a building. Protocol would never allow it. Kids are going to grow up and think that this is what cops do and frankly I can't stand for it."
TL/DR:
Its not about whether they're going out and having fun, its about displaying a fantasy reality that appeals to a certain part of the market. It breaks out of the status quo, and livens things up a bit.
So again - I back this 150%. Emulating it in real life is fucking stupid. Just try to be like I was when I was 11 - make the difference between Ice T claiming he kills cops and his mother and what you're supposed to do in life.
You can like the music without carrying out the message.